The World Says You're a Jew. Now What?

On the morning of October 7, 2023, my nephew, a student at NYU, woke up and reached for his phone. His feed was already flooded with posts attacking Israel. He didn't yet know what had happened there.

Only after scrolling through post after post did he piece together what had happened hours earlier. Hamas terrorists had crossed into Israel, murdered some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza.

Like many Jewish college students, he had a Jewish life, but it wasn’t the center of his identity. He attended Jewish events and the occasional Shabbaton, and moved easily between his Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Being Jewish was part of who he was. He just never assumed it was how other people saw him.

That changed quickly, as other people began drawing the line for him. Within days, posters went up around campus with the faces of the hostages: grandparents, mothers, teenagers, and dozens of children, some of them babies, taken from their homes and held in tunnels under Gaza by Hamas.

The posters appealed to a basic human instinct: whatever anyone thought about the Middle East, surely no one could look at the photograph of a kidnapped four-year-old and feel nothing.

His response triggered a deluge of hate messages, many of them from people he knew and had thought were his friends.

Yet the posters were torn down, again and again. When the university suspended a student for ripping them off the walls, my nephew posted that the school had made the right call.

His response triggered a deluge of hate messages, many of them from people he knew and had thought were his friends. They defended the student who had torn the posters down and called my nephew Islamophobic, as though what bothered him was the student’s religion rather than the sight of kidnapped Jews being stripped off the walls. Many of those friendships ended right there, and the campus environment became so toxic for him that he went abroad the next semester.

Singled Out for Being a Jew

When I talked with him afterward, what struck me most was how well he held up. He didn’t fold, and he didn’t quietly wonder whether the crowd had a point. He was shocked that so many educated people had lost the ability to tell right from wrong on something so plain.

He was singled out because he was a Jew. But he had no sense of what being a Jew is for, and why it might be worth everything it was suddenly costing him.

He knew he had been singled out because he was a Jew. But no one had given him a sense of what being a Jew is for, and why it might be worth everything it was suddenly costing him.

This encapsulates the story of a generation.

The world has spent the last three years telling Jews, loudly and clearly, that they are Jews. But what is less clear is who gets to decide what it means, the people shouting at them or the Jews themselves? How we answer that question will shape the Jewish future more than any campus policy or election.

Simmering Antisemitism

For decades after the Holocaust, many Jews, especially in the West, believed that antisemitism had been pushed to the margins. It was ugly and it still existed, but it belonged to cranks and to history. Respectable people didn’t go there.

Then came October 7. Before Israel had buried its dead, and before a single soldier had entered Gaza, crowds were in the streets of major cities, and they had not come to mourn. The old hatred hadn’t disappeared after all; it simply found new expression - in the language of human rights, anti-colonialism and social justice, and with it a new respectability on campuses, in newsrooms and across professional life.

But what it said to Jews was very old. It didn’t matter whether you had ever been to Israel, voted there, or held any opinion about its government. No one asks Chinese-American students to denounce Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs before they are welcome at the lunch table, yet Jewish students were expected to disavow the Jewish state as the price of belonging. It has often been said that Israel has become the Jew among the nations; the reverse is just as true, and every Jew is now treated as Israel’s ambassador, whether he signed up for the job or not.

People who had given little thought to what it means to be Jewish were suddenly being asked to account for it by classmates, colleagues and strangers.

One of the stranger results of these three years is that people who had given little thought to what it means to be Jewish were suddenly being asked to account for it by classmates, colleagues and strangers, and every one of them has had to decide what to do about it.

Who Gets to Define a Jew?

In 1946, in the book published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “the Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew.” He meant it as part of an attack on antisemitism, and his argument was that the antisemite, in effect, creates the Jew. For a secular Jew, that can feel uncomfortably accurate: you are Jewish because the world won’t let you forget it.

It is also a trap, and Sartre himself came to see it. His account, for all its good intentions, left the Jews nothing of their own, no history, faith or purpose beyond being hated. Late in life, in conversations with his secretary Benny Lévy, who was returning to Judaism, Sartre acknowledged that the Jews have a real history and hope of their own, one no antisemite wrote for them.

If your identity is whatever your enemies say it is, you have handed them the pen.

If your identity is whatever your enemies say it is, you have handed them the pen. To a large degree that is what has happened for the past two generations. Much of Diaspora Jewish identity has been built on the Holocaust and on the fight against antisemitism. Remembering is a sacred duty, but when the story you tell your children is mainly about the people who hated you, you have in effect let them write it. A Jewishness built on being hated has little positive to teach your children, and little to offer them except a reason to walk away.

Jewish tradition makes the opposite claim. When the prophet Bilaam was hired to curse Israel, he looked at the people and said instead: Am levadad yishkon, "a nation that dwells alone" (Numbers 23:9). What was meant as a curse came out as a blessing, describing not a people cut off from the world but one whose sense of itself doesn't depend on the world's approval.

What the Jews of Shushan Did

An earlier generation went through something similar. The Jews of Persia in the Purim story were comfortable, hobnobbing with the non-Jews in the capital Shushan as they attended the king’s feast. Then Haman described them to the king as “a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the nations, whose laws are different” (Esther 3:8), and a decree for genocide went out to kill “all the Jews, young and old” (3:13). Haman made no distinction between the observant and the assimilated; to him, a Jew was a Jew.

The Talmud (Shabbat 88a) makes a remarkable claim about what happened next. At Sinai, the Jewish people had accepted the Torah under a kind of compulsion, but now in the days of Purim and Achashverosh they accepted it again, freely. This is the meaning of the phrase in the Megillah, kiymu v’kiblu (Esther 9:27), “they upheld and accepted,” which the Talmud reads to mean that they now upheld with love what they had long before accepted more from a sense of fear.

The generation that finally embraced the Torah with a full heart was the very one that had just been told by the most powerful empire on earth that they were Jews and would die for it.

Consider this: the generation that finally embraced the Torah with a full heart was the very one that had just been told by the most powerful empire on earth that they were Jews and would die for it. They could have treated their Jewishness as a liability to be minimized; instead, they answered by defining themselves.

The Choice in Front of Us

October 7 provoked three distinct responses amongst Jews.

Some Jews have distanced themselves. This is the familiar “As a Jew” declaration, assuring the world that they are not that kind of Jew. Privately, it may be nothing more dramatic than a necklace tucked beneath a shirt or silence in the group chat.

I don't judge anyone who is afraid, but distance buys less than it promises because the people demanding it rarely stop at the first concession.

Others, like my nephew, have stood their ground. That takes real courage, but resistance alone is still reactive. It may carry you through a hostile semester; it is harder to build a Jewish life on, much less pass one to your children.

And some Jews have gone deeper. They stopped asking, “Why do they hate us?” and began asking, ”What is it about being Jewish that has been worth carrying for all these centuries?” They opened a page of Torah or a book of Jewish history, came to a Shabbat table, and went to Israel to stand with family Jews who never thought of themselves as religious are lighting Shabbat candles, baking challah, signing up for classes and turning up at shul for the first time in years. This is the response of Shushan, taking an identity the world forced on us and choosing it for ourselves.

This response lasts because it is built on who you are rather than on who hates you. That identity is yours to create, and every Jew who chooses to learn, to celebrate, to show up, becomes part of a story that has outlasted every enemy who tried to end it.