Jews Must Stop Thinking and Start Acting

As I write this, it has just been reported that two Jews in San Jose, California were viciously beaten by antisemites because they were speaking Hebrew. Every day, there is some new assault committed on innocent bystanders who are simply being Jewish in public. As these incidents continue to mount, the danger does not appear to be evaporating at all.  Meanwhile, in trying to address this daily concern, too many of our Jewish thought leaders are focusing their exclusive attention on Jew-hatred as an idea and not as an existential threat.

For example, Jewish periodicals, blogs and podcasts are devoting considerable time and space to a new debate over whether the phenomenon of Jew-hatred needs to be reframed as antizionism instead of antisemitism. The proponents of rebranding it as antizionism argue that the contemporary accusations against Jews revolve not around Jews as an ethno-religious group but as a national identity connected to the modern state of Israel. Whereas those who support the preservation of the term “antisemitism” believe that the baseless allegations against Israel are really no different from the classic libels against Jews, just repackaged to fit contemporary circumstances. Both sides of this disagreement are laying out their cases.

Another example is the ongoing debate as to whether there should be a hyphen in words like “antisemitism” and “antizionism.” Advocates of the hyphen’s removal argue that the punctuation mark in the middle of a compound word declares the latter half an “ism,” and thus an ideology.

My response to all this is simply this: who cares?

None of these intellectual ruminations are going to bring us one step closer to safeguarding Jewish lives. Not a single Jewish life has been saved by removing a hyphen from a word. Not one.

As an intellectual myself, I understand the tendency to want to use my brains rather than my hands. Certainly, as a Jew, I was raised to value books, not guns. It is in the Jewish nature for us to be more inclined to solve problems with our minds rather than our fists. The Torah tells us that this nature is what in fact distinguished our forefather Jacob from Esau: “The lads grew up and Esau became one who knew trapping, a man of the field; but Jacob was a wholesome man, abiding in tents.” (Genesis 25:27).

But there is a point at which this tendency becomes a detriment to our existence. Jews in the Diaspora fail to see that there are so many threats against the Jewish people that cannot be resolved by intellectual efforts. This is because there are people out there who hate us and want to see us dead. It does not matter why they hate us; it only matters that they do. Ultimately it all boils down to the fact that people’s hearts and minds are infected with an evil, incomprehensible inclination to blame the Jews for everything they hate about the world. They cannot be understood; they can only be stopped.

The failure on the part of Jews to see this simple fact has led to two dead ends. One has been the path taken by Jews who support Zionism but believe firmly in the power of the mind to deal with our enemies. The other is the antizionist side who believe that the libels against Israel are true, and that therefore it is Zionism itself that threatens Jewish survival.

Take the Canadian Jewish Studies professor Mira Sucharov, for example. In numerous social media posts, she has claimed that the phrase “globalize the intifada” is not a call for terrorism against Jews worldwide, but rather a call to link the suffering of the Palestinians with all the oppressions of the world. The idea here is patently absurd. When anti-Israel protesters chant their phrases and hold up their signs, they’re not simply asking other people to accept an idea. They are calling for physical change, in this case through the means of violence.

Similarly, the focus on clarifying that Zionism is not an ideology but rather a core component of Jewish identity is not a solution to our security threats. Social media influencer Adam Louis-Klein spends endless hours a day posting highfalutin and pretentious screeds about why we need to start embracing the idea that antizionism is a hate movement. And as he insists that what he calls “meme warfare” is a winnable strategy, he criticizes those of us who promote practical defense.

Instead of removing hyphens, Jews need to sign up for self-defense training. As I argue in my book, “The Armed Jew: The Case for Jewish Gun Ownership,” personal firearms are the most practical means of self-defense, but there are also other ways for the more physically adept among us. In addition to personal defense, our communities need to be better safeguarded. Synagogues and Jewish schools and community centers need to start implementing better tactical protocols and take security more seriously.

Adam L. Fuller, Ph.D., is Clayman Professor of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Youngstown State University. He is the author of “The Armed Jew: The Case for Jewish Gun Ownership” (Wicked Son, 2025).