We Are Better Than This

If you're not Jewish, please take a moment to read this. It gives voice to what many are feeling, but so many more are failing to acknowledge.

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, my social media feeds were flooded with black squares. CEOs wrote letters of solidarity and leaders of all levels offered visible displays of allyship. Companies held listening sessions, made donations, and gave employees time off to reflect and heal. Professional sports leagues shared anti-hate messages on uniforms. There was a collective acknowledgment of pain, fear, and injustice. Some would admit today that they did this without completely understanding why they had to. But even those people did so anyway, because so many of their fellow human beings were in pain and asking them to support their cause. So they did.

Without comparing the two experiences, I want to share with you what the Jewish community has experienced over the past several months, and the striking lack of support and solidarity.

Since October 7, 2023, Jews around the world have experienced a level of violence, fear, and vulnerability not seen since the 1940s. A rise in antisemitism is evident in the rhetoric and vandalism Jews have seen for well over a year in their communities and on their social media feeds. And in the past couple of months, antisemitic behavior escalated to multiple acts of violence, including murder.

In April, on the Jewish holiday of Passover, a man tried to burn down Jewish Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence with his family inside.

In late May, a young couple—a Jewish woman and a man who was preparing to convert to Judaism—were publicly executed in Washington, DC. When apprehended by police, the shooter said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” The couple was shot 21 times.

Barely a week later, in Boulder, Colorado, a man firebombed a peaceful march advocating for the release of Israeli hostages while shouting “end Zionists”. Dozens were burned, including a Holocaust survivor and many other elderly people.

In early June, a man in Michigan was arrested for planning a mass murder at a Jewish preschool. This massacre was prevented only because the man was caught trying to purchase assault weapons.

In response to these events and after monitoring online activity, the FBI and DHS declared there is an elevated threat to the Jewish community in America.

This spree of events has been extremely traumatic for Jews everywhere. It caps off 18 months of mounting intimidation and attacks on Jews around the world—on campuses, in places of worship, in homes, businesses, restaurants, and more. Yet the response from society, especially from the same leaders, institutions, and voices who claimed to stand for justice in 2020, has been shockingly quiet. There has been no flood of letters from CEOs. No social media squares. No mass vigils or protests. No corporate giving. Barely a dribble from Hollywood.

Most of the figures speaking out have been Jewish. Many Jews do not know a single non-Jew who has addressed these incidents on social media or in company communications. Many have not had a single non-Jew check in on them to ask how they are holding up. If they are afraid. If they feel unsafe.

Just a few years ago, allyship was emphasized as a moral imperative. Today, many of those allies are conspicuously silent, even after Jewish leaders proudly stood up to support other groups’ social justice causes, as they have for decades.

This has left Jews everywhere feeling isolated from any degree of support outside their own community. The hallmarks of antisemitism that Jews have observed for centuries—blaming Jews for society’s ills, spreading falsehoods or outright lies about Jews, or ignoring Jews’ pleas for support—are visible throughout our society today.

In fact, these warning signs of antisemitism are increasingly evident in multiple influential institutions in our culture. Particularly, Jews are observing this in academia, the news media, popular culture, and politics.

Colleges and Universities

Antisemitic rhetoric is, unfortunately, deeply rooted on many college campuses, which have become a key point of incubation. Ideological activists have spent years emphasizing a simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed framework where moral responsibility is determined not by character or actions, but by identity, and academic leaders have been especially receptive to this framing. Because I wrote extensively about this in early 2024, I won’t spend too much time on that here, but I welcome you to read that post, which time has validated in many ways. What is important to know is that within this lens, Jews have been arbitrarily cast as “oppressors,” unworthy of support, an ideology that’s visible in campus leaders’ lackluster response to campus unrest.

The News Media

CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and The Washington Post have all repeatedly published and later retracted false stories of alleged Israeli atrocities, based solely on claims from Hamas or Al Jazeera, without any independent fact checking. For example, days before the DC murders, a viral claim spread that 14,000 babies were going to die in 24 hours due to the Israeli blockade in Gaza, which was a dishonest twisting of a United Nations statistic. Then, the very day of the Boulder firebombing, those news outlets reported that the IDF murdered Palestinians seeking food at an aid distribution center in Gaza, even though there was no evidence that the shooting occurred.

While both stories were retracted, those corrections were buried. Meanwhile, lies always travel much further and faster than the truth, inflaming antisemitic rhetoric online and in the real world, aided by social media algorithms. These retracted reports, from legitimate news sources, give credibility to people aiming to paint Jews as the oppressive enemy.

Popular Culture

In 2017, when a terrorist bombing killed 22 people and injured over 1,000 others at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, artists like Coldplay, Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus hosted a tribute concert that raised over $13 million to support victims and their families. It was a deeply moving show of compassion and a cause my own daughter raised money for at the time.

But an even deadlier attack took place at the Nova Music Festival on October 7th. Nearly 400 young adults, including festival goers and staff, were slaughtered by Hamas, making it the deadliest massacre at a music event in history. Yet the music world was conspicuously silent.

Last summer, I visited the Nova Exhibition in New York, a memorial to the victims that features footage captured on the terrorists’ own GoPro cameras and attendees’ cell phones. Outside the building a crowd of protestors gathered, lit red and green flares, and held signs stating “long live the intifada,” effectively celebrating the very massacre that the memorial was commemorating.

Can you think of any other instance where we have ever tolerated the protesting of a memorial?

Political and Civic Leaders

Among government and civic leaders, there has also been a clear lack of compassion or consistent moral standards. Humanitarian groups such as UN Women, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—normally swift to condemn gender-based violence—remained noticeably silent in response to the rape and murder of many Israeli women during the October 7th attack. These organizations stood by while the survivors of these assaults had their credibility openly questioned, including by the United Nations. It wasn’t until March 2024 that the UN quietly acknowledged the veracity of those women’s claims.

And in our polarizing political moment, one thing that unites the fringes on opposite sides of the political spectrum is antisemitism. The progressive wing of the left is now rivaling the right in promoting antisemitism, often with far less scrutiny and criticism. Cloaked in the language of social justice, this has become the fastest-growing and most socially accepted form of antisemitism today, hiding in plain sight. Even Van Jones, a progressive commentator, recently called out this behavior, questioning whether progressives are being manipulated into hating Jews.

The same people who condemned the chants of “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville are now conspicuously silent when antisemitic hate—thinly disguised as “anti-Zionism”—rings out across many other campus quads. They say nothing when calls to “globalize the intifada” or “free Palestine from the river to the sea,”—which are explicit calls for the eradication of Israel—inspire violence against people simply for being Jewish.

And make no mistake, this rash of attacks is not precisely targeting staunch supporters of Israel’s war in Gaza. In fact, the opposite is true.

Governor Shapiro has criticized the war in Gaza and staunchly opposes the current Israeli government. His home wasn’t set on fire because of his views, but because he is Jewish.

The man who shot the couple in the street in DC didn’t know a single thing about his victims. He surely didn’t know that the couple were public advocates for peace between Israel and Palestine. He saw two people who appeared to be Jewish and loudly and proudly executed them.

The marchers in Boulder were not rallying in support of Israel’s current government or its actions. Their goal was to raise awareness about the dozens of hostages still imprisoned in Gaza 18 months after October 7th. And a person decided to try to burn that group of Jews to death.

War is horrific, and there has been extraordinary suffering in Gaza. Many civilians in Gaza desperately want Hamas to lay down their weapons and return the hostages. Many Jews who believe Israel has the right to exist strongly oppose both the war and the Netanyahu administration.

Seeing the rise in antisemitic rhetoric and violence makes something crystal clear: even Jews who oppose the war are not safe from this ideological danger, because recent events have shown that many see the war as justification to target any Jewish person. The war is regularly used to justify the boycott or exclusion of Jewish customers, businesses, academics, athletes, and institutions around the world. Jews are being harassed for wearing traditional religious garb. They are seeing their businesses torched and vandalized, as was done in the lead-up to the Holocaust. And Jews are being targeted for lynching and murder on an increasingly frequent basis. These acts have nothing to do with Israel. People are not asking these Jews if they support Israel’s current war or government before they harass or harm them. They are frequently using “anti-Zionism” as cover to target a group of people they hate. Zionism itself is a term these assailants have weaponized beyond what Jews believe it to mean: that Israel has a right to exist.

Jewish parents today routinely tell their children to hide visible signs of their identity and it has become common advice among Jews to change their last names on rideshare apps as a practical safety tip. And outside of nearly every Jewish place of worship or school, there is invariably armed security or a police car.

The fear is real. The threat is real. This is all happening right now. I urge you to pay attention.

This is why so many Jewish people feel a deep, unwavering connection to Israel, not just as a homeland, but as a safeguard for their right to exist freely and openly in a world that too often fails to protect them. Without it, the fear of another Holocaust isn’t theoretical. And looking at the world today and the behaviors and actions we have normalized, it is hard to argue that fear is misplaced.

The double standards are clear and the lack of basic moral clarity is devastating.

Listening to people defend the indefensible is exhausting.

We have a choice.

As individuals. As leaders. As communities.

We can recognize right from wrong.

We’ve stood up for what’s right before.

We can stand up again.

We are better than this.

Now it is time to prove it.