Thursday, May 15, 2025
From Ian:
Dan Senor: The Future of American Jewry After October 7
Dan Senor: The Future of American Jewry After October 7
‘The time is now.’ In January 1948, Golda Meir delivered a famous speech to a group of Jewish leaders in Chicago a mere four months before the establishment of Israel. Her message was clear: The future of the Jewish state hung in the balance. The Jews in Palestine needed every cent American Jews could spare.Leo XIV: A papacy anchored in Israel’s embrace?
“I beg of you—don’t be too late,” she said. “Don’t be bitterly sorry three months from now for what you failed to do today. The time is now.” She intended to raise $25 million; by the end she had raised $50 million. (In today’s dollars, that would be nearly $700 million.)
The tables have turned. Israel is going to be fine, in part because of Israeli strength and resilience, backed up by the Diaspora’s continued commitment. But I do think the future of American Jewish life hangs in the balance. And I don’t want any of us—whatever our resources—to regret not doing more.
We really do have the tools to rebuild American Jewish life. The question is: Do we have the sense of purpose—the why—to match?
Hersh Goldberg-Polin spent just three days with a fellow hostage named Eli Sharabi in the tunnels of Gaza. In that time, Hersh taught Eli a lesson that would change his life. He quoted the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl: He who has a “why” will find the “how.”
Israelis have a why. Many who may have forgotten it were reminded of it on October 7, when everything changed. Since then, Israelis have seen the why come roaring back.
Agam Berger, held in captivity for 450 days, had a why. “I learned,” she said after her release, “as my forebears did, that imprisonment can’t overwhelm the inner spiritual life. Our faith and covenant with God—the story we remember on Passover—is more powerful than any cruel captor. Even as Hamas tried to coerce me into converting to Islam—at times, forcing a hijab on my head—they couldn’t take my soul.” Her friend, Liri Albag, fashioned a Haggadah out of whatever materials she could find in captivity, and they marked the Passover Seder together, yearning for redemption.
Aner Shapira had a why. In a bomb shelter beside Hersh on October 7, he faced a death squad and chose to act. He hurled seven live grenades back at the terrorists before the eighth took his life. He died saving his friends—and strangers—because he knew he served a people greater than himself.
Ben Zussman had a why. A reserve officer in the IDF, he wrote a letter before heading to the front lines in case the worst came to pass. And when his parents opened the letter after his death, they found these words: “If you’re reading this, something must have happened to me. As you know about me, there’s probably no one happier than me right now. I’m happy and grateful for the privilege to protect our beautiful land and the people of Israel.”
We—the Jewish people—should look to Israel not simply for its defense innovation or health care advances. We should look to Israelis for their clarity, their purpose, their deep sense of identity. Hersh, Eli, Agam, Aner, Ben—very different people, very different lives. But each of them met this moment with courage. With faith. With an unshakable sense of why.
The deepest question. What is our why? Why are we here? Are we truly owning the story we’re living in? These are not theoretical questions. They are practical and will determine the future of our families and our communities.
The state of World Jewry depends on how we answer.
If we answer in the way I’m suggesting, by resolving to live Jewish lives, and making sure our children do as well, we will begin to find that answer. The road in the near term will not be smooth. We know enough to know that we are witnessing another story, another chapter in Jewish history. There will be libraries invaded by campus mobs, there will be Nazi graffiti scrawled on the walls of subway cars, there will be another podcaster spreading libels about the Jewish people. Of this, we can be sure. I am confident, however, that in the long term, if we strengthen our Jewish identity, our people will not be prominent but weak. They will be Jewish and strong.
Many young American parents over the past 18 months have chosen to pay tribute to some of the Israeli heroes we lost in this war. Everywhere you look, it seems, you might meet a young baby Hersh—named for Hersh Goldberg-Polin—or baby Carmel, for Carmel Gat, or Ori, for Ori Danino, or Maya, for Maya Goren.
These young American Jews will carry their names into the future. I imagine, 18 years from now, young Hershs and Carmels and Oris and Mayas walking onto the quad together, on one of a thousand American campuses. And my prayer is that as much as they carry their names, they will also carry their courage, their essence. That they will know who they are, where they come from—and where they’re going.
Political Without Partisan DelusionSeth Mandel: Universities Are Proving How Avoidable This Anti-Semitism Fight Was All Along
The political instincts of Leo XIV defy the taxonomy beloved by pundits. He is not a banner-waving conservative, but neither is he a proxy for the Soros-funded clerical avant-garde. His experience in Latin America made him wary of both economic oligarchy and class warfare slogans. He has spoken of inequality as a moral concern, not a campaign slogan. He supported Francis’s environmentalism only insofar as it remained moral, not technocratic.
Prevost sees the modern state as both necessary and dangerous—a position closer to Hobbes than Rousseau. He believes in order. He respects subsidiarity. He doubts that bureaucracies can save us. In today’s Rome, this qualifies as heresy.
Trump: Enemy, Ally, or Interlocutor?
He has never commented on President Donald Trump directly, and he likely never will. But his Vatican record is revealing. When some U.S. bishops tried to aggressively discipline pro-Trump clergy or push blanket condemnations of “Christian nationalism,” Prevost counseled caution. Not because he supports the former president, but because he understands what Trumpism represents: a political insurgency born of cultural dislocation.
In a Church hemorrhaging the working class, Prevost knows better than to treat populists as lepers. He doesn’t moralize about MAGA hats. He listens. In an ecclesial environment increasingly dominated by NGO-speak and bourgeois sensitivities, that makes him both countercultural and, paradoxically, pastoral.
Zionism and the Jews: A Return to Dialogue
If Francis’s Vatican flirted with fashionable anti-Zionism—hosting Mahmoud Abbas, parroting UN talking points—Leo XIV is a corrective. Prevost has visited Israel repeatedly. He has expressed admiration for the resilience of Jewish life and has cultivated ties with Jewish leaders in Peru, the United States, and Europe. He does not sentimentalize the Palestinian cause, nor reduce the Middle East to a victim-oppressor binary.
According to sources in Rome, Prevost views Israel as “a moral project within history”—a phrase that startled the Latin desk at the Secretariat of State. He has called Netanyahu “a necessary man in dangerous times,” which, in Vaticanese, borders on radical candor. There will be no warm embraces for Hamas delegates under this papacy.
On May 12, three days after his election, Pope Leo XIV has chosen to reaffirm his commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations as his first official act. In a letter to major Jewish organizations, he pledged to continue and deepen the Church’s dialogue with the Jewish people, invoking the spirit and principles of Nostra Aetate, the landmark declaration of the Second Vatican Council, which repudiated antisemitism, rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus, and called for mutual respect and understanding between Catholics and Jews.
I didn’t realize that school officials could respond immediately to stunts like this. I was under the impression that administrators who criticize students are violating the constitutional protections that the Founders enacted to let kids do whatever they want with no consequences.
Further, the statement is one of shocking clarity for a university. It actually says something.
Which leads me to believe that schools can, in fact, crack down on idiotic rulebreaking. And that they could have done so all along. Now it can be told!
And third: Much of the argument around academic freedom these days is a dodge. Long before anyone was threatening to cut funds going to schools that violated the civil rights of Jewish students, the affected students had come to administrators with a simple ask: that schools enforce their rules consistently with no double standards.
That’s it. Really. It’s hard to remember, but that’s how all this started—with Jewish students asking universities to stop enforcing rules only on behalf of favored identity groups.
And that simple request is what sent schools into a tailspin. No, they said—you can’t make us! Then eventually a president came along who said: Well yes in fact I can, because it’s federal law.
We’re here because universities refused to enforce their rules equally or consistently. Are they happy now with how far this fight has escalated? I don’t know, but that escalation was their choice. And there’s really no denying it anymore.
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