Oct. 29: #Resistance Days Are Here Again

UNRWA out; Floyd Mayweather visits Israel, again; Walz tagged as Beijing's dream candidate

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The Big Story

We are one short week out from Election Day—or the end of election season—and the Harris campaign is trying to raise its poll numbers through sheer force of will. For weeks before Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, chin-stroking commenters showed off their History Channel-level of deep context by noting that the German American Bund held a pro-Hitler rally, at a different venue also called Madison Square Garden, in 1939. Having primed the pump, Harris surrogates discussing the event had their talking points all laid out: Trump’s jamboree, according to the gals on The View and Democratic politicians, not only was like a Nuremberg Rally or Ku Klux Klan konclave, but outdid both in terms of the mass expression of racial hatred.

The Trump campaign didn’t help things by platforming a “roast” comedian who made nasty jokes about Puerto Rico and Mexicans. I asked a friend who has been doing stand-up professionally for decades why Tony Hinchcliffe thought a high-profile political rally would be the best place for that bit, and he responded, “Give a comedian the keys to a car, and he will happily drive it into a tree for you.” But Hinchcliffe’s gaffe hardly seems to have made a major impact at the polls; the betting markets have increased Trump’s odds of winning since Sunday.

Media types have amped up their outrage past boiling to the point where it is sublimating directly into a gas. Whoopi Goldberg told her fellow View panelists that Black, Latino, and Muslim Trump voters who imagine they will be spared from the coming nightmare are fools, especially those who are married to white people. “He’s not gonna say, ‘Oh you’re with a white guy, we’re gonna save you from being deported,’” she explained. “No, he’s gonna deport you and put the white guy with someone else. The man is out there!” Rassenschande may not be itemized in the GOP platform—nor even in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, which, as Elon Musk suggests, has become QAnon for liberals—but that’s the whole appeal of paranoid belief systems. When vibes are dispositive, your own intuitions trump shared reality.

Whoopi Goldberg’s fantasy of mass deportation of nonwhite American citizens, and the subsequent forced marriage of the remaining white population to each other, presumably for the purpose of outbreeding the dusky masses, speaks to the rise of The Handmaid’s Tale as the prevailing myth of modern #Resistance feminism. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel was ostensibly a critique of Reagan-era Christo-fascism, though in reality it always read as typical Canadian resentment about American cultural dominance: Recall the especially absurd role that Canada, of all places, served in the novel as a haven of freedom to which the slaves of Gilead aspired to escape. The 2017 TV show, essentially a soft-core soap opera, has inspired thousands of mostly white, middle-class women to cosplay as “handmaids” at protests—where, garbed in cape and wimple, they stand in mute witness to the horrors of Trumpian sexual bondage. Of course, it would be in poor taste to note that their costumes are in fact the standard uniform for millions of women in the Muslim world, where the hijab is mandatory, the honor killing of fornicating women is normal, and abortion is criminalized. That’s liberatory, you see. … Did you know that Muslim women are entitled to inherit property!

At the same time that Whoopi Goldberg has the vapors and Keith Olbermann screams that he will soon be tweeting from inside a concentration camp, one gets a sense that the American left might be a little excited about the prospect that Trump could be president again. On Sunday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did a livestream with Tim Walz in which she begged the viewers to vote:

We’re eight days out from an election and I’m losing my mind. And I’ve got a little smoke coming out the top of my head. But [laughs] get it together! Get it together! Cast your vote so we can be done with this! I do not want to do four more years of resistance nonsense under Donald Trump, okay? Like, good God. Like, do we remember what it was like waking up every day and there was some shit going on?

The Communard doth protest too much! Think how much fun the left had under Trump. One problem with installing a permanent revolution is that it makes fighting the power really awkward when you and your friends are the power. Having Trump in office is a great way to activate the base. Everyone can get their Handmaid robes out of storage and dust off their black bloc riot gear. AOC can pose next to parking-lot fences and pretend to weep at imagined horrors. The midterm electoral strategy is prewritten, and requests for donations will soon jam up email inboxes throughout the nation. Rob Reiner, Stephen King, and Mark Ruffalo will have plenty to tweet about, and Robert De Niro can get standing ovations for cursing at award shows. Meanwhile, the DNC can work on its batting order for 2028 and see if Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg are ready for primary time.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet Editor Alana Newhouse urges you to take the Jewpill

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The Rest

→Following revelations that some United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff were members of Hamas and directly involved in the Oct. 7 massacre, the Israeli Knesset overwhelmingly voted to bar the agency from operating in Israel and essentially restricted its entrance into the West Bank or Gaza. While close cooperation between UNRWA—the only U.N. relief agency tasked to work with just one “refugee” population—and Hamas has never been secret, reports of cross-membership have confirmed suspicions that UNRWA essentially provides cover for a terrorist organization. U.N. officials have condemned the Knesset’s vote and said it would intensify the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his government will work with other international aid organizations to ensure that assistance continues to flow where it is needed.

→In 2016, the purchase of a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Facebook ads by a Russian bot farm was enough to spark a massive federal investigation into a presidential campaign and the illegal surveillance of a sitting president. This year, the Department of Justice acknowledged that the Islamic Republic of Iran hacked the Trump campaign, but has refused to give anything in the way of details or background. New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, writing in The Wall Street Journal, lists 13 questions she has asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to answer, including how the FBI discovered the intrusion, the extent of the hack, when and how Trump campaign data was communicated to the Harris campaign, and the use of FISA Section 702 (authorizing the collection of foreign intelligence from non-U.S. persons) in this case. Wray has stonewalled Stefanik and refused to provide any answers. When Iran interferes in American elections, it’s no cause for alarm.

→Boxing superstar Floyd “Pretty Boy” Mayweather, who won titles in five weight classes, is a fan of Israel, which he calls his “home away from home.” The undefeated champ has visited the Jewish state four times since the Oct. 7 attacks, meeting with wounded soldiers, donating protective equipment, and signing autographs. “I see so many bright faces, so many beautiful people. You guys are brave warriors. I take my hat off to everyone in here that goes on that battlefield,” said the pugilist known as “Money,” on his most recent visit.

→Veep nominee Tim Walz’s résumé doesn’t just include volunteer high-school football assistant coach and part-time National Guard sergeant under “extracurricular activities.” You can add “potential Chinese Communist Party mole” to his list of accomplishments, according to an unnamed Department of Homeland Security official. “You all have no idea how this feeds into what prc [the People’s Republic of China] has been doing here with him and local gov,” the official wrote, shortly after Walz’s nomination was announced, to an internal DHS chat regarding national security. “It’s seriously a line of the intel,” the official added. “Target someone who is perceived they can get to DC.”

→Social media news aggregator and message board giant Reddit has always skewed left and is notorious for its “woke” user base. But The Federalist reports that it’s getting even more so: The Harris-Walz campaign has been intimately engaged with manipulating the r/Politics subreddit, to the extent that hundreds of volunteers take direction from paid staff to post and amplify daily messaging points from the campaign. The Federalist got access to extensive annotated Excel worksheets identifying different subreddits to target with specific types of posts, including details on how to time posts to defeat spam filters that will ban a user for “queue flooding.” We all know about astroturfing, and it would be naive to imagine that political campaigns rely on natural enthusiasm to generate social media heat, but the extent to which the Harris campaign has managed to rig the world’s ninth most visited website is startling even to savvy observers.

→Tablet news editor and resident expert on Middle East affairs Tony Badran weighs in on news from Lebanon regarding a cease-fire deal:

There are a number of reports floating purported parameters of the “deal” that the Biden administration is looking to impose on Israel regarding the situation on its northern front. The version floated by Nadav Eyal in a Tuesday report for Yedioth Ahronoth incorporates elements long advocated by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, which themselves are in line with Hezbollah’s preferences, along with somewhat tame elements that allegedly reflect what some in the Israeli security establishment may be agreeable to. 

Irrespective of which version we’re looking at, the very concept of a deal, and the notion that Israel should agree to anything a week before the U.S. election, are both absurd. The basis for Hochstein’s deal, UNSCR 1701, is an anti-Israel instrument predicated on elements on the Lebanese side—the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon—that are Hezbollah auxiliaries or fronts. Both, by design, will lead to Hezbollah’s reconstitution.

What Hochstein is reportedly trying to sell are elements that supposedly offer supplementary so-called guarantees for the “effective” and “full” (more on that in a minute) implementation of UNSCR 1701. One element is this international arbitration mechanism that includes the United States and other states. The ludicrous proposal is a throwback to the mechanism of the April Understanding of 1996 (which Hezbollah has described in the past as “tailored to the needs of the resistance.”) It would serve to reestablish the pre-Oct. 7 protective umbrella that the Biden administration had extended to Hezbollah and to reposition the United States as an arbiter between Israel and Hezbollah, placing constraints on Israel’s sovereign decision-making and national security. I described what this means in my Ottoman American Empire piece in Tablet. In fact, that’s what the administration means by “full implementation” of 1701: ending Israel’s ability to continue with overflights or any kinetic action in Lebanon in response to Hezbollah activity. That’s another Hezbollah talker that the administration has adopted as its own position. You can see in these leaks that the Israelis are trying to include in these supposed proposals continued freedom of action for Israel in Lebanon, which on the one hand negates the U.S. position, and on the other hand reflects a naivete in believing that Team Biden would support Israel on this point. 

Last, it’s unclear where the inclusion of Russia, referenced by Eyal, came from, but it’s equally ridiculous for Israel to place its security in the hands of the Russians as it is to put it in the hands of the French, who have business interests with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, or the Americans, who have spent the past year trying to prevent Israel from taking any action against Hezbollah. 

That last point underscores how absurd it would be for Israel to subscribe to any such proposal after what it has achieved against Hezbollah in such short order, and to do so before the election. All the more so should Team Obama return to the White House. The only thing of relevance for Israel in Lebanon is total operational freedom to hit at will, whenever and wherever, in order to keep Hezbollah from reconstituting itself. Anything else is at best noise, and at worst a trap. Either way, Israel should ignore it.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Democrats’ Insanity Defense, by Park MacDougald

Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents’ agenda in focus groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.‘

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Jewpilled

American history is a series of revolutions. The next one is underway.

by Alana Newhouse

I talk to Jews. All day, every day. Boomer Jews, Gen X Jews, Gen Z Jews; Jews who are devoutly religious, and Jews whose favorite food is bacon; Jews in cities and Jews in suburbs and Jews in rural areas; Jews who are very rich, Jews who live below the poverty line, and everything in between; Hollywood Jews, Wall Street Jews, academic Jews, art Jews, doctor Jews, lawyer Jews, and Jews who blessedly don’t fall into any such category; Ashkenazic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews and Jews (like my late mother) who call themselves “Sephardi Tahor”; Jews who are right wing and those who are left wing, Jews who hate politics and Jews who love politics; gay Jews and straight Jews and Jews who either don’t care or don’t know which one they are; Jews who are in relationships, Jews who are single, divorced, widowed; Jews from Iran and Russia and France and Latin America and Australia and London; diaspora Jews who moved to Israel, Israeli Jews who’ve moved to the diaspora, and Jews who, instead of going anywhere, fight with their spouses about where they would theoretically move if one or both of them were different people; Jews who used to be non-Jews, and Jews who used to be Jews but now consider themselves not; Jews who make “bark mitzvahs” for their dogs and Jews who wear the tallis that their great-great-great grandfather wore. I sometimes talk to other kinds of people, but it’s usually in between talking to Jews.

I do this because it’s my job. But it’s my job because I am endlessly curious about these people, and because I love them—even the ones I can’t stand.

I also talk to people about Jews. This used to be fun, but it’s gotten annoying. Lots of people intuit that American Jews are at a point of inflection, but every popular theory about how or why this is happening is off. In legacy media as well as on social platforms, in WhatsApp groups, at synagogue meetings, political canvassing projects, and even around my own dining room table—outdated or just plain wrong narratives are asserted with a confidence bordering on stridency.

A sampling:

The change underway is driven by the denominations. Everyone who is Reform is going one way, and everyone who is Orthodox is going the other. (Bonus points if your interlocutor refers to them as “Reformed.”) People who make this argument can’t compute the existence of figures like Ammi Hirsch or Diana Fersko, and also inevitably feel shocked and outraged when confronted by Conservative and Orthodox people who, in this important moment, won’t stand fully in defense of Jews and the West, without reservation or apology.

It’s generational! Young Jews are abandoning the beliefs held by their parents, and in doing so they are radically changing the nature of Jewish identity. Are many younger people today contracting borg brain? Yes. And I feel terrible for them and their loved ones. But these people are, by definition, followers; they’re not deciding anything.

Judaism is ultimately a religion, and religion isn’t cool. In the wake of Oct. 7, a huge swath of American Jews has very obviously been drawn to faith. My own X and Instagram feeds were filled with people, of all ages, noting that this past Yom Kippur was their first time fasting. (And not just Patrick Beverly.) In September, investor Daniel Loeb launched an effort to get Jews to study Torah weekly for a year, and hit his year-end goal of 10,000 sign-ups in three weeks. TikToker Ellie Zeiler began keeping Shabbat after Oct. 7, taking her millions of followers along as she left her life in Los Angeles to enroll in a Jerusalem seminary.

Jewish communal professionals and people at federation dinners are not the only ones who can’t quit old assumptions about Jews. In the spring, I asked a popular conservative writer to contribute a piece denouncing right-wing antisemitism; it fell apart because, as far as this writer knew, all Jews were wealthy and secular and inveterately left wing, and therefore partly to blame for America’s problems. (We’re going to leave aside how depraved it is to be unable to denounce antisemitism when it comes from your own side, not because you don’t see it but because it feels like the targets might deserve it.) Like elite prognosticators who believe the people in their own bubbles must be representative of everyone, this person couldn’t conceive that any other kind of Jew might exist in meaningful numbers, and didn’t trust me when I said they absolutely did. Why? Decayed narratives, for starters.

What these shopworn ideas have in common is that they are rooted in the ways Jews used to be categorized or known, not as they are now. When new realities confront old assumptions, it causes understandable dissonance—but remaining in a perpetual state of shock is simply a way to avoid the work of life.

So what, really, is going on with American Jews?

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During the second half of the 20th century, American Jews categorized themselves by a set of specific affiliations. At the top were the three big religious denominations—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox. Politically, a majority of Jews affiliated with the Democratic Party; the minority that didn’t expanded and contracted depending on the candidates, but never went above the 45% who voted for Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. After the Holocaust and the Six-Day War, anti-Zionists were pushed to the fringes, existing only in vanishingly tiny numbers. Federations tried to appeal to all Jews in a specific geographic area, and national organizations often organized them by political orientation or specific cause. New immigrant communities sometimes mapped neatly onto this matrix, and sometimes didn’t: The Syrian/Mizrahi community in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey, communally identified as Orthodox; Persian Jews were all over the map, and Russian-speaking Jews often had no religious or Jewish communal affiliation at all. Then there were cultural and socioeconomic affiliations, which often cut across all other lines. As a system, it was layered and messy, but it had internal logic.

This entire world, and all of its categories, is in the process of disappearing. For many, it’s already gone. It fell apart for the same reason every other framework in American society fell apart over the past two decades: because we are undergoing an economic revolution, and economic revolutions always beget societal revolutions—challenging and often destroying old ideas, assumptions, and institutions, and rearranging and even redefining life at every level.

I’ve been writing about this for years, noting along the way how hard it is for people to absorb the death of the world they knew—and how I noticed that acceptance often came only when one had no other choice. For many American Jews, that moment of reckoning arrived on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath, as they came face to face with just how politically powerless, demographically irrelevant, and devoid of meaning or spiritual sustenance nearly all of their institutions, affiliations, and leaders had become. The entire postwar framework, according to which Jews understood, organized, and portrayed themselves for at least six decades, is over.

In its place is a new dominant split, which is not solely religious or political or cultural, though it encompasses elements of all three.

On the one side will be many Jews, I believe a technical majority, for whom Jewish identity is complicated and getting more so. Religious observance feels alien to these people, maybe even downmarket. Israel is either out, or on its way out, of their affections. They are more likely to want to affiliate with a non-Jewish museum or high-profile charity than with a Jewish organization or project. They find themselves moved, if not convinced, by the arguments of those who see America and its foundational trappings—capitalism, meritocracy, free speech—as unfair, and possibly outdated. For some, these feelings compel them to distance themselves from their communities and even their own families.

At a dinner recently, a Jewish couple who live in Manhattan and send their kids to a WASPy prep school, presented me with their diverging views: Since Oct. 7, she’s felt overwhelmed by the attention that Israel’s story has gotten in the spaces she inhabits, and ultimately turned off by it, whereas for him it’s instigated an unexpected swell of attachment and pride. As they sparred in front of me, their tones and postures became sharper. I thought it might help if they understood that, far from being specific to their relationship, their conflict was reflective of a broader trend. Instead, they both looked at me unhappily. “I guess we intermarried after all,” the wife said.

Two weeks later, I saw the husband at an event in a synagogue—I suspect the first time he’d been inside the building for something other than a major Jewish holiday or bar mitzvah. He was wearing one of those Israel-America flag pins, and he introduced me to his 16-year-old son, who proudly showed me his new Magen David pendant.

That kid would be right at home among the dozen people in their 20s I recently interviewed, the vast majority of whom consider their own views in flux. For the first time, a significant segment of smart young Jews are putting politics downstream of their Jewishness, as opposed to the other way around. They refuse to buy the propaganda that partisan politics and party affiliation must be paramount in their identity, and that the outrage circus it’s a part of must be central to their lives. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my fertile days arguing with people about politics,” one of them told me. “I want my friends and I to be able to have partners and kids and houses and good jobs, and I want those things for other Americans too.”

That this is happening among Jews in their 20s will be catnip to Jewish communal professionals, who’ve spent the past three decades thirstily obsessing over this age cohort. Sadly, these “experts” will likely again miss the exact obstacle that tripped them up this whole time. Over the past 25 years, the Jewish philanthropic landscape has been littered with one project after another meant to target young Jews, but which inevitably ended up siloing them away from any larger community they might meaningfully join for the rest of their lives. As a result, almost none of these projects had any meaningful success.

Fortunately, a segment of young Jews today absolutely perceives a Jewish future for themselves, but it’s because they see, or at least intuit, that they’re part of an unexpected coalescing of very disparate Jews, of all ages: Orthodox as well as those who have never lit Shabbat candles; converts and non-Jewish relatives, many of whom are often more open and adventurous when it comes to Jewish experiences; right wingers and gay men and women; third- and fourth-generation Ashkenazim, as well as new immigrants from around the globe. What these people have in common is also what separates them from the majority. They are all looking reality head-on and, without denying how bad a lot of it seems, reflexively deepening their connection to two things: Jewishness, and America.

“It’s interesting how much has changed,” a smart Jew in her late 20s recently told me. “Israel means something different, and America does too. We are neither begging for salvation nor hysterical nor blissfully ignorant. We love Israel and also love America. Not in lieu of loving Israel or being Jewish! People are choosing America because it makes their lives meaningfully better for reasons that are important to them. But it’s not because it’s just easier, and we aren’t choosing the assimilation of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Maybe—I know this sounds woo woo—this embrace and recategorization is just Jews stepping into a higher order of how we see ourselves, and others.”

The ideas these people are buzzing around are actually fairly straightforward. As Liel has summarized them: “That private property is personally rewarding and socially generative; that capitalism and invention fuel growth and happiness; that there’s no substitute to raising and being part of a family; that nation-states, flawed as they may be, are the best expression of some unique, mysterious, and indelible collective character (which means that Israel—which combines population with religion, ethnicity, and culture in the form of a state—is not some ‘unprincipled exception’ but actually a superior example of what all countries should aspire to); that the West, however flawed, remains committed to expanding freedoms, however slowly it may proceed; that there’s some sort of divine force guiding the storm, whatever you choose to call it and whatever you think it demands of your life.”

More importantly than any one belief or principle, these people are, as one of them put it to me, “over the handwringing.” You can see it in gorgeous humans on Instagram doing fit checks while casually talking about Torah; in Persian Jews mobbing Douglas Murray at the Beacon; food influencers cooking for the IDF, haters be damned; music collectives putting out unabashedly proud Jewish albums; designers making clothing and housewares and art without apology; and more. And you can see it in Ellie Zeiler and Dan Loeb and the man with the flag pin and his son and everyone who fasted for the first time this Yom Kippur.

“I don’t need fact sheets or Instagram posts ‘answering’ challenges by clout-chasing celebrities and journalists from Park Slope,” one of my interviewees told me, “and I don’t need to apologize for being a Jew or a Zionist or for loving America. Our enemies are stupid and gross, and I can’t tell you how uninterested I am in spending my time in their dead-end worlds.” People like this guy are not less intellectual or less invested or less mindful of our problems; what they are is less conflicted, less self-conscious, and happier.

I hear you yelling, “These are just engaged Jews, Alana! Engaged Jews are like this.” Except many of these people are not “engaged Jews,” according to any of the previously maintained metrics: They aren’t necessarily religious, they aren’t driven primarily by politics; and the vast majority aren’t affiliated with any Jewish organization. And on the other side, many of those who would qualify as “engaged Jews” are letting themselves be drained of hope. I had lunch last week with a man who could be in a textbook under “affiliated Jew”—deeply knowledgeable about Jewish history, deeply invested in Jewish communal life, deeply connected to Israel. And deeply, deeply dark. “Name one time in history when Jews ever said, ‘You know, we should have stayed,’” he said. “America is over, and the Jews are in trouble.”

In short, there is no clear demographic split happening here. Instead, the primary difference between Jews who are chest-out right now and those who are conflicted or recessive (or worse) is emotional.

Consider the conceit at the heart of The Matrix, in which intelligent machines have trapped humans inside a simulated reality, meant to distract them while their bodies are harvested for energy. Neo is offered two pills: a blue one that allows him to remain in the illusory world that he knows, or a red one that enables him to see the hard truth.

The metaphor scares older people and schoolmarms, who misunderstand it as narrowly political—with the blue pill meant to represent Democrats, red pill the Republicans.

In any case, in an effort to either sidestep this weirdness or make the metaphor actually relevant to their lives, internet denizens added two more pills to the box: the black pill, meant to signify those who, when faced with the reality of their world, feel extreme pessimism and an overall sense of despair; and its opposite number—the white pill—used to describe those who look at the challenges of our day and feel instinctively that moments of change can be moments of possibility. Their feelings and actions are rooted in hope.

What I’m seeing is a version of this fourth way. A group of people—not a specific demographic group, not a trend captured or capturable by a survey, probably not a majority, but instead a unique phenomenon that is at once amorphous and also a consistent feature in history—are Jewpilling.

***

There’s a concept in Jewish history known as the remnant of Israel, according to which the future of the Jews is assured, through every seemingly apocalyptic calamity, by a small remnant that manages to survive. It’s a clever and inspiring notion: “On the one hand the prophets foretold the forthcoming exile and destruction of Israel, and on the other they held forth the hope and promise of its survival and eternity. The doctrine of the Surviving Remnant resolved this contradiction.” In other words: How can you imagine there might be a safe, happy, fulfilling future while faced with an overwhelmingly scary and dark present reality? This is how.

In my own life, this nice-enough idea curdled into a tough personal challenge over the 2010s, which was a decade that tested me intensely. To everyone else, this seemed like an era of exhilarating progress and growth: America elected its first Black president, spring was coming to the Arab world, and the internet was making everything closer-faster-better.

But the view from inside my head was terrifyingly different: Both of my parents fell ill at the same time and I needed to take over their care, which consisted of watching two once-vibrant people decline precipitously, in ways they never would have wanted, until finally succumbing to death, one soon after the other; I gave birth to a son with a debilitating disorder that went undiagnosed for years; my entire industry was decaying from the inside, a reality everyone avoided as online publications were giving out gold rings and legacy outlets were busy drunkenly spending down their reputational and actual capital on fraudulent business ideas and even more fraudulent political ones; Jews and Jewish communities were under increasing threat, including from people and entities they believed were dedicated friends, and my magazine and I were routinely accused of exaggerating just how bad this trend was going to get, and how fast. The more my friends, colleagues, sources and others tried to cheer me up or “play devil’s advocate,” the more I felt their own denial of reality. I had good reasons for it, but I became seriously, scarily blackpilled.

Then 2020 happened.

For whatever reason, that terrible year, and the few after it, broke the spell for me. Instead of stewing in anger and fear, I used my experiences to guide me in looking outside myself—at the rest of the country, and at the systems undergirding it. I came to understand that the brokenness of my own life was a small shard of a big kaleidoscope that had shattered, affecting millions of people in uncountable ways.

Then I looked into two rearview mirrors—the history of the Jews, and the history of America. What I saw in both was the power of believing you have a good future ahead of you, even when that seems unlikely.

Imagine being at Mount Sinai: The Exodus happens! You and your family are freed from bondage. You have every reason to think your life is about to be as good as you’ve always dreamed it could be. Instead, you’re left wandering the desert for 40 years. It’s miserable, and hard, and feels like it might be endless. Finally, your time comes! Or you think it does. Moses goes up to a mountain to get instructions from God, but it takes forever. You lose faith, which leads you to almost lose everything else. Somehow, after all that, you salvage hope. In exchange, you get huge gifts—not what you thought you wanted, because in fact neither you nor anyone around you actually knew what to ask for. Instead, you get the right to build a new future—which, it turns out, is actually everything you needed.

Now fast-forward a little.

From the time that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Jews were cast into another special status, one of official outsiders. This status had very specific parameters. On the one hand, Jews were not considered idolators—heretics who had to be spiritually and often physically eliminated. On the other hand, Jews belonged to a prior religion that had been supplanted by this new and ostensibly better faith. The price of our existence was that we had to publicly display our inferior status, and labor under all kinds of legal exclusions—forced to live in ghettos, made to wear certain clothing, and so on. We were, in short, tasked with being a living example of the inferiority of the prior form of monotheism. And for the exact same reason, this was also life for Jews in Muslim lands, where systems of dhimmitude amounted to a variation on the same theme: It was our role to continue to exist in a position that was visibly inferior to the new and more correct religion, and in this way to prop it up.

With the Enlightenment, society’s proposition to the Jews flips entirely on its head. When conceiving of the idea of a modern secular state, the problem of the Jews quickly becomes central—which is why the French Assembly, when trying to determine how to understand their new idea of secular citizenship, spent months talking about whether or not Jews could qualify. Their answer? Yes, absolutely. A Jew could be a citizen, but only as a Frenchman. Jews were welcome to fully participate in society, but could only maintain Jewish identity and practices within their private homes. This created a problem for Jews, since Judaism makes no distinction between the domestic sphere and the wider world: We are instructed to put mezuzahs on doors facing the street, for example, or wear head coverings regardless of where we are. In this way, many Jewish laws directly clashed with this seemingly generous new framework.

So, in the previous regime, the state demanded that Jews perform a set of actions—wear dedicated clothing, live in cordoned places, have specific occupations—that set them apart from everyone else; this new regime now demanded the opposite: That Jews not do anything to set themselves apart, in any way. Only then, when you are no different, may you be considered equal.

America, by radical contrast, made no such demand of the Jews—from any direction. Unlike the European secular state or those run by the church, the American state was founded on a completely different basis—one rooted in the aspiration to individual and communal liberty, everywhere. If the American system could allow Jews to live fully as both Jews and Americans, that would mark the country as a truly new civilization, one that radically diverged from Christian Europe, Enlightenment Europe, and the Muslim world. That Jewishness and Judaism were built into the DNA of this country was neither a coincidence nor a sideshow. It was central to the American experiment.

That there were people who misunderstood the nature of that experiment was always true, and it always led them to disappointment. Indeed, declaring that America has come to an end is a national pastime that goes all the way back to the second generation of Puritans, a group of black-hearted depressives who looked around at their log cabins and their budding villages and towns and somehow saw … failure. Their parents had come to this country because, not unlike Elon Musk and his Mars mission, they believed that if they could show how harmonious a new world could be, it would somehow fix the world they came from—that it would end the religious wars back home, and mend Europe. When those wars did eventually end, but it turned out to have nothing to do with anything the Puritans did or didn’t do, the reaction of their children was to rend their garments and declare the American experiment over—when it was, quite obviously, just getting started.

The same thing happens around the American Revolution, the forming of the Constitution, the Civil War, and so on. At every crucial juncture in this country’s history, a set of skeptical people emerges. They insist that reality had turned, that the challenges of the day were too daunting to overcome, and that this must mean America had finally run its course.

Is it possible that, this time, the latest iteration of Puritan blackpillers are finally right? Sure. Anything is possible. But if you’re a betting man, you’ll notice their track record isn’t great. American history is a series of revolutions. That’s not the system failing; that is the system. Or, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot: It only feels like the end because that’s what beginnings feel like.

It’s worth noting that today’s blackpillers share three things in common: They are angry about or disappointed in America, they don’t like Jews, and they are obviously unhappy. This is as true of people like Ilhan Omar and the Hamas lovers at college encampments as it is of that seemingly endless supply of roided out right wingers like Andrew Tate, Hasan Piker, Jake Shields, and others. These people may consider themselves on opposite sides of the political aisle, but they are united in misery.

By contrast, the happiest, most hopeful people right now are the ones who—again, after looking at reality head-on, acknowledging every real problem, and accepting that there is a lot of work ahead—are determined to see a bright future for America. And every such joyful, optimistic person I know or can think of is, to a one, either Jewish or philosemitic. None of that is an accident: It’s how America was built.

I try not to take sides in the many fights Jews have with each other, in part because it’s professionally awkward but also because I truly feel kindred with Jews of all kinds—even those with whom I disagree. But when it comes to this new split, I’ll admit that I am Jewpilled, and have been for some time now. It seems clear to me that history wants us to survive and thrive—and by us I mean Jews, and Americans. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the majority, either in society at large or among other Jews; in fact it’s probably good if you’re not. What matters is that you’re the remnant—the remnant that saves all.