Thursday, April 16, 2026
Demonstration on Fifth Avenue
You could pluck the left’s (astonishingly stupid) response to the events unfolding in the Middle East right out of an anti-war demonstration on Fifth Avenue, held on July 7th, 1941. “Why not peace with Hitler?” a now infamous sign read. “Hitler has not attacked us. Why attack Hitler?” declared another. One demonstrator held a poster board demanding, “Stay out of Europe,” and another stated, “Arm Britain and prolong the war.”
A Response to the Call for Dissolution
I read it twice. I wanted to be fair. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t believe it was possible to be reading these words, glowing on my phone’s screen well past the midnight hour, in the year 2026.
The letter currently circulating under the banner of "spiritual urgency"—calling on American Jews to “withdraw consent from Zionism,” demanding Israel’s “unconditional surrender and dissolution,” and asking us to trust the "rest of the world" to sort out the wreckage—is one of the most sophisticated pieces of antisemitic writing I have encountered in years. I use that word with full awareness of its weight, precisely because the author would almost certainly deny it.
Antisemitism is a virus that mutates. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were hated for their race. Today, they are hated for their nation-state. Denial is not just a defense; it is part of the architecture.
The letter is not subtle about its demands. However, those demands rest entirely on a foundation of missing history. In this conversation, missing history is never an accident.
For the record: Israel was established through the 1947 UN Partition Plan—a legitimate resolution of the same international body the author invokes when calling for "accountability." The Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine accepted partition. The Arab League rejected it, launched a coordinated military assault from five countries, and instructed Arab residents to evacuate temporarily while they "drove the Jews into the sea." They failed. The Jews won. Those who were told to leave, promised a swift return by their own leadership, became refugees.
That is not propaganda. That is the historical record.
The Palestinian refugee crisis is a genuine tragedy. But it is a tragedy that was manufactured and deliberately sustained for eighty years because a solvable refugee crisis is a political liability, while a permanent one is a weapon. Jordan, Egypt, and Syria had the land and resources to absorb these populations. They chose not to. They chose to keep the wound open to keep the pressure on Israel. The people who paid for that calculation were the children and families who simply wanted to live.
Jewish indigeneity to the land is not a "settler-colonial narrative." It is archaeology, linguistics, and three thousand years of unbroken liturgy. It is the Passover Seder. For two millennia, in every corner of the Earth, Jews have closed their holiest night with the same five words: L’shana haba’a b’Yerushalayim. "Next year in Jerusalem." To claim Zionism is a foreign implant onto Jewish tradition is to admit you have never actually engaged with the tradition.
The letter tells us that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran have "never been enemies of the Jewish people."
This letter was published in 2026. After all we have seen.
My argument does not begin with October 7th, because the violence did not begin there. I lived in Jerusalem for five years. I can count on my fingers how many times I took a bus, for fear of it evaporating in a fireball. I walked everywhere because buses were targets.
I am thinking of Yoni Jesner, killed in a Tel Aviv bus bombing in 2002, whose family donated his kidney to save an Arab child. "To save a life is to save a world," the Mishnah teaches. That is who Jews are called to be. I am thinking of the Sbarro pizzeria bombing; the Park Hotel Seder massacre, where thirty people were murdered while celebrating liberation—the most Jewish possible moment to be slaughtered. I am thinking of the 3 teenagers abducted and murdered for the crime of existing.
The hatred that produced October 7th was not born that day. No Israeli policy created it. No Israeli concession has ever extinguished it. To tell Jews in 2026 that these groups are not our enemies is not a political position; it is a gaslighting demand that we un-see what we saw and un-mourn those we lost.
The author has since "clarified" that she is Jewish, raised in a Jewish home, and married to an activist. She offers this as a credential of "authenticity." I find it clarifying in a different way.
We have watched the documented infiltration of American campuses by organizations funded by outside interests. We have watched students absorb frameworks that did not originate in the American progressive tradition but were imported and cultivated to dismantle it. Sincerity and manipulation are not mutually exclusive. When a Jewish woman looks at Jewish self-determination and sees only "white supremacy," we must ask: Who built the lens she is looking through?
The letter assumes American Jewish opinion is a meaningful lever on Israeli policy. It isn't. Israel has survived wars, intifadas, and international isolation not because American sentiment pointed the right way, but because Israelis understand the alternative. They have lived the alternative. As Golda Meir famously said: “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place else to go.”
Furthermore, does the author truly believe that if Israel ceased to exist tonight, the Iranian regime would stop executing women for refusing the hijab? Stop funding proxies? Stop murdering dissidents? The argument that Iranian aggression is a "reaction" to Israel is not geopolitical analysis; it is a wish dressed as a cause.
Then there is the weaponization of our language. The author uses Pikuach Nefesh—the commandment to preserve life—to argue for collective national dissolution. No serious halachic literature has ever interpreted the preservation of life as a mandate for national suicide.
And then there is Tikkun Olam. This concept has been stretched so thin in progressive discourse that it has become a blank check drawn on the account of tradition to pay for whatever politics are fashionable. In the Aleinu prayer, it refers to divine sovereignty. In Kabbalah, it refers to the restoration of divine sparks. It is not an ancient mandate for anti-nationalist activism. Our tie to the land predates Tikkun Olam as a political slogan by three millennia.
Jews have the right to define antisemitism for ourselves. We do not ask other marginalized groups to submit their definitions of prejudice for external approval. Yet, with Jews, there is always a contingent ready to explain that our perception of endangerment is "clouded" by the wrong kind of Judaism.
This is an old story. For centuries, we were told our visibility was the problem. The Haskalah (Enlightenment) made the promise of safety through assimilation. The 20th century then demonstrated, in the most catastrophic terms, what happens when Jews take that advice and find themselves without a sovereign refuge when the world turns.
This letter is antisemitism dressed in the vocabulary of social justice. It is a dangerously naïve worldview. I suspect many of the "allies" the author believes she is advocating for would be the first to disabuse her of her illusions, should she say these things aloud in the places they actually rule.
Last year, in the UK, I spent my afternoons peeling antisemitic stickers off lampposts. This morning, a friend told me they pulled over their car to tear down a poster that read, “Chr--- in, Kikes out.”
The pipeline from the “enlightened open letter” to the sticker on the lamppost to the gunman in the synagogue is not theoretical. It is documented. It is fueled by the same blood libel that has followed us for a thousand years, freshly legitimized for a new generation.
I will speak out against those who wish me dead. Every time. Without apology. Every generation has tried to write our obituary. We are still writing our own story.
You do not get to define our disappearance as "liberation."
Why I Am Leaving Harvard
Two weeks ago, I delivered my final lecture at Harvard, concluding a forty-year tenure as a professor of history. Four decades at one of the world’s preeminent universities provides a singular vantage point from which to witness a profound transformation: the systematic replacement of Western history with "global history." This shift is not merely a curricular tweak; it is a primary reason why the younger generation now finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation. As T.S. Eliot once observed, “A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.” Today, that pattern is being intentionally unraveled.
My decision to retire was a deliberate departure. I am finishing a four-year retirement contract signed in the fall of 2021—the year I realized I no longer wished to teach at Harvard. We had just endured two years of a strict Covid regime, a form of emergency governance that mirrored the nation’s uncritical genuflection to "The Science." It was a period marked by a reflexive proclivity for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, we were commanded to lecture through masks and conduct seminars over Zoom. Neither practice is compatible with a liberal education, which requires the unmediated encounter of mind and spirit.
The year prior, the university had "taken a knee" during the "Summer of Floyd." What I initially mistook for empty virtue-signaling turned out to be a structural revolution. While reviewing graduate applications in late 2020, I found a candidate who was, by any historical standard, a perfect fit. In previous decades, he would have been a "shoo-in." In 2021, however, a member of the admissions committee informed me bluntly that admitting a white male was “not happening this year.”
This was not an isolated incident. That same year, a certifiably brilliant undergraduate—the top student in his class and winner of the prize for the best overall academic record—was rejected from every graduate program he applied to. He, too, was a white male. When I called colleagues at other elite institutions to ask how such a talent could be passed over, the answer was always the same: an unspoken protocol of exclusion had taken hold. It brought to mind C.S. Lewis’s warning in The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Harvard may currently be seeking a "safe pair of hands" under President Alan Garber following the Claudine Gay debacle—a fiasco that exposed a shocking indifference to anti-Semitism—but the rot in the humanities remains deep. I have chosen to move my work to the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. While Harvard’s history department has essentially abandoned the Western tradition, Hamilton is committed to it. When pedagogy replaces "Western Civilization" with a nebulous "global history," the socialization of young Americans is fractured. As the saying goes, “When you don't teach the young what civilization is, they become uncivilized.”
The data of decline is irrefutable. In the last decade, Harvard’s history department has not made a single tenured hire in a Western field—ancient, medieval, or modern. The last internal promotion to tenure in these fields occurred in 2012. While we have lost eight giants of Western history to death or retirement, the department has outsourced Ancient History to the Classics department and allowed other core fields to die on the vine.
Critics will claim that the "death of Western history" is hyperbole, pointing to a catalog "pullulating" with courses. But these courses are often peripheral or politicized. The foundational pillars—the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment—are being traded for a surplus of historians focused on race, gender, and colonialism. We are witnessing what Edmund Burke called a revolution in which “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.”
When I ask why we must privilege Western history, I am met with charges of "narrowness." But to understand the world, one must first understand one’s home. Can I really believe it is more important for an American student to learn about the West than about sub-Saharan Africa? To borrow from Winston Churchill: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” Without the specific context of the West’s failures and triumphs, a student has no compass to navigate the "global" world they are supposedly being prepared for.
The Harvard I joined in 1985 was a different world. It was a place of "disciplinary conservatives"—scholars like Bernard Bailyn and Richard Pipes—who believed that professional standards should never be sacrificed to academic fashion. We used to mock the word "problematic" as a "Princeton term." There was an understanding that our research priorities were not dictated by the whims of eighteen-year-olds. As my mentor Ned Keenan once famously told a faculty meeting: “This faculty does not choose to have its research priorities dictated by the intellectual interests of undergraduates.” That statement, which today would be viewed as heresy, was then met with rapturous applause. It was an assertion of the high calling of history.
In those days, a senior appointment at Harvard required a "field-defining book." As my late colleague Mark Kishlansky used to say: “When a new senior appointment at Harvard is announced, what you expect to hear is, ‘Not him!’ What you don’t want to hear is, ‘Who?’”
Today, the "Who?" has become the norm, as identity and "intersectional scores" replace the two-book standard. By contrast, the Hamilton School has, in just four years, hired forty-eight outstanding scholars—many of them the "dreaded" white males or women working on "disfavored" traditional subjects. They represent the refugees of a system that has traded excellence for equity. I am joining them because I believe that the study of the West is not a funeral rite, but a necessity for a free people. If Harvard no longer wishes to be the guardian of that flame, we will light it elsewhere.
Josh Shapiro’s Retreat from Reality
We can finally put the rumors to rest: Josh Shapiro is not a double agent for Israel. He is, quite simply, a double-crosser.
For years, the progressive left whispered that Shapiro’s “moral clarity” regarding the Jewish state was a symptom of dual loyalty. They need not have fretted. His recent pivot—decrying the 2026 war against the Iranian clerical state as the “wrong war” and demanding a hasty retreat—proves that when the political winds shift, Shapiro is perfectly capable of abandoning a democratic ally to placate the faculty-lounge wing of his party.
The prevailing narrative, curated by the New York Times and echoed by Jessica Tarlov—the embittered voice of The Five—attempts to cast Benjamin Netanyahu as a Levantine Rasputin. In this telling, Netanyahu is an occult figure whispering instructions into the ear of Donald Trump, "leading" him into a conflict that Tarlov and the Times editorial board treat as a personal errand for Jerusalem. It is a grotesque caricature that strips an American President of his agency and revives the ancient, twisted tropes of the "Jewish puppet master." The irony is thick: Tarlov and her fellow travelers have effectively adopted the anti-Israel canards of Tucker Carlson. They have joined a "horseshoe coalition" where the isolationist right and the progressive left meet to suggest that American blood is being spilled solely at the behest of a "Zionist lobby."
Shapiro’s attempts to litigate the war’s origins reveal the mind of a man drowning in his own sophistry. He complains that we traded an "80-something-year-old Ayatollah for a 60-something-year-old Ayatollah," as if the age of the figurehead were the only metric of victory. In doing so, he willfully ignores the strategic reality: the U.S. and Israel have dismantled the Supreme Council and the IRGC command structure, decimated its industrial base, and neutralized its navy and air force. To Shapiro, the decapitation of a global terror infrastructure is a failure because the replacement tyrant has a better pulse. He treats the existential security of the West like a human resources dispute. As Carl von Clausewitz famously noted, "Victory is not just the conquest of territory, but the destruction of the enemy’s physical and moral forces." Shapiro seems to have forgotten both.
Furthermore, Shapiro has retreated to the pedantic argument that one cannot wage war while battling inflation—a claim as historically illiterate as it is cowardly. Had Shapiro been advising Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR after Pearl Harbor, he would have demanded a surrender at the first sign of a rising Consumer Price Index. Significant inflation is the frequent companion of existential struggle, driven by the mobilization required to save a civilization. To suggest that a superpower must pause its defense because the price of eggs has risen is to signal to every tyrant on earth that America’s resolve is tied to the local grocery bill. As John F. Kennedy once said, "The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it."
“If you don’t know why you’re going in, you don’t know how to get out,” Shapiro quips, as if the purpose of destroying a regime that funds the rape, murder, and kidnapping of civilians is somehow a mystery. The President did not need a teleprompter to explain why he struck the world’s leading sponsor of terror; the thousands of rockets falling on Haifa and the IRGC-funded militias targeting American sailors provided a script written in fire and blood.
The “Blame Bibi” crowd relies on the convenient fiction that Netanyahu is a rogue extremist. Yet, whether it is Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, or Yair Golan, any leader in Jerusalem shares the same strategic imperative: Iran must not have the bomb, and its proxies must be broken. Would Tarlov or the Times accuse a Prime Minister Lapid of “leading” America into war? Of course not. By focusing solely on Netanyahu, they are simply updating the blood libel—asserting that every Middle Eastern conflict is a Jewish invention.
Then there is the Shapiro alternative: to force the rotting corpse of the Oslo Accords down the throats of an Israeli citizenry that has spent decades being slaughtered by the very people Oslo was meant to empower. Contrast the Governor’s calculated hedging with his colleague from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman. While Shapiro, the shapeshifter, chose the path of dishonor, Fetterman has remained a man of conviction. He understands the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
To demand that Israel stay its hand now is not a quest for peace; it is a retreat into fantasy. Shapiro has traded the mantle of a principled leader for the convenience of a critic, proving that while he may not be a double agent, his commitment to an ally’s survival has a very short shelf life.
What Winston Churchill said about Clement Attlee applies perfectly to Shapiro: "He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing," a hapless hack who fills a much-needed gap in the moral and intellectual fiber of the American Republic.
