The Crisis Hasn’t Passed; It’s Deepening

Jewish and Israeli students at UK universities hid their Magen Davids for fear they would be “targeted” on campus. In Paris, Jewish homes were again marked with Stars of David. And in New York, as antisemitic incidents surged across boroughs, a Jewish mother told me quietly, “I’m absolutely terrified.” Her voice shook not from panic but from exhaustion—the dread of raising children in a world that no longer feels safe for them and existential threats are now very real.

We as a Jewish community keep telling ourselves the storm will pass. The war will end. The protests will fade. The hate will quiet. But it hasn’t and it won’t. What began after Oct. 7 as a torrent of antisemitism has now settled into something worse: a steady, normalized hostility toward Jews, Israel and the moral legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood itself. We are not witnessing an emergency that is ending. We are living in one that is hardening and normalizing with now over one-third of American Jews having witnessed an incident of actual or threatened antisemitic violence in the past year; 14% have developed a plan should they need to flee the country.

In New York, Assemblyman and now New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his Democratic Socialist allies openly call Israel “genocidal” while smearing American Jews who support the Jewish state as complicit in mass murder framed in the language of justice and equity. Their slogans aren’t shouted from the margins; they are spoken in the chambers of power, echoed by activists who claim to be “anti-colonial” while justifying terrorism. What we’re seeing is not protest; it is political capture. The language of elimination has been normalized. Candidates are winning seats by turning Jewish self-defense into a moral crime. The party of Moynihan now tolerates members who accuse Israel of genocide and demand its dismantling.

And the rot is bipartisan. During his current, 2025 mayoral campaign, Republican hopeful Curtis Sliwa was confronted with a resurfaced 2018 video in which he railed against Orthodox Jews as “able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day … make babies like there’s no tomorrow,” warning that they were “trying to take over your community lock, stock, and barrel.” It wasn’t whispered; it was broadcast. The lesson is clear: Antisemitism now cuts across party lines.

Across the Atlantic, the pattern is even clearer. In London, 35% of British Jews now feel unsafe in public—quadruple the number before Oct. 7—and antisemitic incidents remain near record highs. In Paris, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin warned of the increasing dangers to Europe’s largest Jewish community with nearly 1,600 antisemitic incidents recorded in 2024, most linked to the war against Hamas. Soldiers again guard synagogues. This is not cyclical hatred. It is structural.

Yet our own institutions still behave as if the crisis is episodic. After Oct. 7 they scrambled—Zoom calls, task forces, “solidarity campaigns.” Then they drifted back to the familiar: statements, committees, incrementalism. When Jewish students begged for help on campus, most found those institutions absent. As former Harvard graduate student Shabbos Kestenbaum wrote in the New York Post, “When students needed them the most, so many were MIA.” He added, “Hundreds of millions of dollars went to the ADL and all these organizations to fight antisemitism, but antisemitism has only increased.” He’s right to suggest that “there needs to be an inquiry as to how these nonprofits raised so many millions annually,” for “if monoliths that shaped Jewish American life cannot reinvent themselves, they may end up running their course.”

Those lines capture a painful truth. The great Jewish organizations of the postwar era—federations, advocacy networks, defense agencies—were built for assimilation, not confrontation. They know how to convene; they don’t know how to fight. At Harvard, months passed before administrators condemned open calls for violence against Jews. National advocacy groups issued cautious statements instead of unified demands for accountability. The silence was deafening.

The Jewish community has no shortage of money or talent. What it lacks is moral clarity and strategic readiness. As I wrote in these pages last year, “Outside of the classroom, there are far too many clear-cut cases of demonstrated violence against Jews such as the mobs at Berkeley … or more insidious examples such as at my own Sarah Lawrence with faculty behaving in antisemitic ways, peddling anti-Jewish conspiracies.” I also warned that “The Hillel data tell a story of destruction. We must accept and confront this reality and take action; there is no ambiguity now about what has happened over the past academic year.” Those words, unfortunately, have proven to be true.

The Jewish community has no shortage of money or talent. What it lacks is moral clarity and strategic readiness.

Philanthropy still flows to buildings and banquets, to projects that reward prestige rather than protect people. Millions are spent on branding while Jewish teachers are doxxed, students bullied, and synagogues barricaded. That is not continuity; it is denial. Meanwhile, younger Jews are doing what our ancestors always did when institutions failed them: They are building their own. Grassroots defense networks, pop-up Shabbat communities, online education projects, and direct-donor campaigns are filling the void. They are nimble, morally direct and allergic to euphemism.

If the hate has globalized, so must our response. We need to act not like a comfortable diaspora but like a mature nation-people that takes threats seriously. That starts by empowering and backing our students and our children—the ones who are standing on the front lines of this fight. They are enduring the chants, the walkouts, the intimidation and the online mobs. They deserve protection and preparation, not platitudes. They must be equipped to hold the line with moral confidence, civic knowledge, and the unwavering sense that their community stands behind them.

“The Jewish community must stop standing on the sidelines of this crisis; it must lean in and take control and stop the erasure and manipulation of our history and our values,” I wrote last year. That must now become our collective creed. Empower our children with truth. Back them with resources. Teach them to answer lies with evidence and hate with resolve. Every school, campus, and youth movement should become a training ground in resilience and civic courage.

Every school, campus, and youth movement should become a training ground in resilience and civic courage.

Edmund Burke wrote that a society is a partnership among the living, the dead, and the unborn. The current custodians of American Jewish life have forgotten that covenant. They inherited a flourishing community and risk leaving a hollowed one. Renewal is not optional; it is the essence of Jewish survival. This is not only a Jewish struggle. It is a civic one. A society that cannot protect its Jewish citizens cannot protect pluralism at all. To defend Jewish dignity is to defend the democratic experiment itself.

The old guard blinked. The next generation cannot afford to this. The hate that animates Mamdani’s New York or the mobs of London and Paris will not disappear on its own. It will intensify until it meets resolve. That resolve must be communal, creative, and unapologetic and it must be taught, modeled, and transmitted. The hate must be called out for what it is with clarify and conviction and Park Avenue Synagogue Rabbi Elliott Cosgrove finally did just that along with other religious leaders. In response, we collectively must now build the infrastructure. Fund the organizers. Train the spokespeople. Guard the doors. Empower our children. Back the students. Teach them to hold the line. The just announced Anti-Defamation League’s Legal Action Network is a good start, but is only a start and one of many paths that must be laid out and then fortified.

The crisis is not ending, it’s settling in. The only answer to chronic hate is sustained strength. Jews cannot and do not wait for others to save them. We build. We renew. We endure. Now we begin again.