The Lessons We Were Taught and the Ones Being Forgotten

I’ve known the author of The Forward’s recent column endorsing Zohran Mamdani for nearly forty years. We attended the same Jewish day schools in Philadelphia, where we were taught by many of the same remarkable and principled teachers who drilled into us demanding lessons: that to be Jewish is to balance justice with responsibility, compassion with survival, and belonging with self-respect.

In our Akiba Hebrew Academy classrooms, we studied the prophets beside photographs of Auschwitz and maps of Israel—lessons written not in theory but in blood. We were taught that justice without memory is moral vanity, and that Jewish survival is itself a sacred obligation. We debated Amos and Isaiah in the same rooms where Holocaust survivors told us what happens when a people mistakes passivity for righteousness. It was not abstract. It was living memory, handed down with trembling voices.

Reading that Forward column, I couldn’t help thinking how far we’ve drifted from that equilibrium.

The writer described sitting in synagogue on Kol Nidrei night beside a candidate who has called Israel an apartheid state and refuses to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state and described that moment as “spiritual,” “safe,” even “at home.”

I don’t doubt her sincerity. But spirituality is not the same as moral seriousness. And Jewish safety has never depended on proximity to fashionable politics. It depends on clarity, memory, and the courage to see reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Our shared Philadelphia education taught us to question, to test, to verify. It taught that truth matters more than comfort and that disagreement, done seriously, is itself a form of devotion. The Forward essay offers the opposite: feeling as moral proof. Pain and empathy are elevated to the level of argument. “He showed up” at Lab/Shul in Manhattan, the writer essentially says of Mamdani, as if presence alone were virtue. But the Jewish tradition is not sentimental; it’s exacting. The prophets didn’t merely show up; they spoke hard truths, often against their own allies.

Since when did it become radical for Jews to defend the right of the Jewish people to exist in their ancestral homeland? Since when did empathy mean erasing our own history? There is a profound moral difference between compassion and complicity, between listening to pain and mistaking those who inflict it for partners in healing.

When a candidate declares he would not recognize any state “based on race or religion,” we have an obligation to ask what that means for the only Jewish homeland on earth. When a movement excuses violence against Jews as “resistance,” we cannot confuse that with moral courage. And when Jewish voters, out of fatigue or fashion, look away, we risk repeating the very history our schools drilled into us never to forget.

Even New York’s most measured Jewish leaders are now acknowledging that line has been crossed. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue—long admired for her inclusiveness and reluctance to engage in partisan fights—recently stated that Mamdani’s 2023 remark that the NYPD’s “boots are laced by the IDF” “crosses the line clearly into antisemitism.” “I fear living in a city,” she added, “where anti-Zionist rhetoric is normalized and contagious.”

Her warning was important and overdue. Just days earlier, I wrote in The Algemeiner about how some of New York’s largest synagogues, including Central, were retreating into neutrality even as antisemitic rhetoric from political figures intensified. The piece’s title captures the dilemma perfectly: “New York Synagogues Speak of Courage — But Then Retreat in Fear.”

Buchdahl’s subsequent statement matters. It shows that even those who tried to remain above the political fray have now seen the danger plainly: that what once seemed like performative radicalism has hardened into something genuinely threatening. Her words reflect what many Jews have been whispering privately for months—that what masquerades as progressive critique has curdled into something darker.

It also reveals how fear operates in polite Jewish society: the fear of seeming divisive, the fear of being labeled intolerant, the fear of losing our welcome in elite civic life. But Jewish history teaches that fear disguised as civility is how moral erosion begins. Courage means speaking before the danger feels safe to name.

This is not about politics. It’s about proportion, memory and moral clarity. Our teachers made us read Amos and Isaiah not because they were progressives before their time, but because they bound justice to covenant, compassion to discipline, and freedom to law. They understood that unmoored empathy easily becomes self-righteousness. The generation that survived exile and persecution built Israel not as a metaphor but as a necessity. To call that project unjust is not prophetic; it’s amnesiac.

Since Oct. 7, the stakes have only grown clearer. The images from southern Israel—families murdered, children taken hostage, kibbutzim burned—were a brutal reminder that Jewish vulnerability is not a relic of the past. Yet even as antisemitism surges to levels unseen in decades, many of our own institutions still hesitate to say plainly what is happening. Too many synagogues and Jewish leaders have traded moral voice for moral vagueness. They issue statements of “complexity” when what the moment demands is courage.

I do not doubt that my former schoolmate means well. She, like many younger Jews, longs for moral simplicity in a brutal, confusing time. The trouble is that simplicity in Jewish life is almost always a form of surrender. Our tradition insists on tension, between universalism and particularism, peace and defense, the stranger and the self. To dissolve that tension by romanticizing our critics is to abandon the intellectual honesty that Judaism at its best demands.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded us, “The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference,” but he also taught that Jewish life demands “the courage to be different.” We are failing that second test.

Yes, we should listen to the pain of those suffering in Gaza. Yes, we should question Israeli policies and expect our leaders to act ethically. But we must also remember who we are—a people repeatedly targeted for erasure, now expected to apologize for existing. Compassion must never mean complicity in our own delegitimization.

The applause that “roared” and filled that Manhattan synagogue on Kol Nidrei may have felt redemptive to some. To me it sounded like confusion, the sound of a community mistaking moral performance for moral purpose. Jewish education once equipped us to distinguish between the two. I worry that, in the name of progress, that discipline is disappearing.

And this confusion is not limited to Jewish life. Across American civic life, we are replacing conviction with display, moral labor with moral theater. Universities, corporations, and cultural institutions all prize affirmation over argument and feeling over fact. But for a people who learned survival through memory, that confusion is especially perilous.

For centuries, Jews survived because we refused to surrender to the moral fashions of the day. We knew that identity untethered from history dissolves into sentimentality. We knew that faith requires discipline, not applause. Our survival has always depended on skepticism, debate and the courage to stand apart when the crowd demanded conformity.

The danger today is not only external; it’s internal. Too many Jews, weary of conflict and desperate to belong, have begun to treat moral clarity as impolite and Jewish self-defense as a kind of chauvinism. That is not humility; it is historical amnesia.

I still believe in the lessons we were taught in those Philadelphia classrooms: that truth matters more than applause, that empathy without memory is sentimentality, and that a Jewish conscience must be tethered to Jewish survival. The Forward essay treats those lessons as obstacles to overcome. I see them as the only things standing between us and the moral confusion of our age.

Applause fades. Memory endures. Our future depends on which we choose to follow.