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."
