Growing up in Argentina, I found American exceptionalism and how it held up Jews as inextricable from the national fabric to be a source of both bewilderment and envy.

Argentinean Jews are patriots. My childhood hero was José de San Martín, the Argentine George Washington. As a teenager, I had a poster of Raúl Alfonsín (the president who brought democracy back to Argentina) on my wall, and you can see me go insane when the national soccer team plays.

Yet the country didn’t feel like the United States felt to American Jews. There was a sense of temporality in the Jewish experience, aided by the country’s perpetual political and economic instability. It was as if we could never fully trust our country.

That was how Jews everywhere felt throughout their long exile. Even when they didn’t experience persecution or discrimination, there was always an insecurity that they accepted as one of the facts of life.

Not so in America, where I moved in 2012. In his famous 1950 exchange with Israeli PM David Ben Gurion, Jacob Blaustein, then head of the American Jewish Committee, claimed that “American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile… To American Jews, America is home. We have no alternative, and we want no alternative.”

Even when, in past decades, Jews experienced discrimination, they could point towards an unequivocal positive trajectory of integration. Instances of antisemitism weren’t seen as disproving American uniqueness. Instead, the way Jew-hatred receded in the postwar years was seen as further evidence that America was “home” in a way that no other diaspora ever was.

Until now.

American Jews have lost something invaluable in the last decade: the feeling that their country and their community are exceptional.

Jews here are starting to feel like their brethren throughout history; they can’t fully trust America. It is as though Jewish history has finally caught up with them.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was, for some, the beginning of that process. It proved that an unpredictable candidate who flirted with racism and xenophobia could get elected to the highest office in the land. His election and his populist style insinuated a sense among many Jews that America had lost its predictability. Many Jews consider Trump friendly to them and Israel, and the weakening of institutions that followed may not have targeted Jews directly, but Jews know intuitively that those institutions are key to their long-term safety. Even if one considers the fears about Trump himself were unfounded, can the genie of populism be put back in the bottle?

After the murderous Hamas raids in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that feeling of lost trust grew by orders of magnitude. The places that had come to symbolize the integration of Jews in American society, like universities and cultural institutions, became overtly hostile to us. The explosion of progressive antisemitism showed how alone Jews were politically and culturally. The conceptual structures that Jews had helped build — such as the human rights doctrine and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — were weaponized against them. Jews found that the minority protections they had fought so hard to establish didn’t apply to them. American Jews discovered with horror that America is as susceptible to antisemitic propaganda as any other country.

Then came the realization that the left and the right will only fight antisemitism when it’s politically expedient, and that both sides will, to degrees small and large, kowtow to their extremists. Instead of creating a “sanitary barrier” around antisemitic politicians (like, for example, all French mainstream politicians built around Jean Marie Le Pen in the 1990s), American political leaders are afraid to “alienate the base” and vie for the endorsement of antisemitic figures.

The victory of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his anti-Israel acolytes in the New York Democratic primaries feels like the nail in the coffin of American Jewish exceptionalism. Mamdani legitimized speech (like “globalize the intifada”) that most Jews consider hateful. His election broke the taboo that being considered openly antisemitic is a political liability. It may actually be beneficial.

It is true that many voters didn’t see Mamdani’s statements as antisemitic. But that makes the problem even worse. If somebody uses the N-word, we don’t conduct a philological study of the word to determine its true meaning. We simply accept that it’s offensive to Black people because that community told us so. But it’s antisemites, not Jews, whom enlightened society gives the power to define antisemitism.

At first, one could assume the main factor in Mamdani’s election was affordability. But the Mamdani-endorsed insurgents who won the city’s recent congressional primaries centered much of their messaging around Israel, AIPAC and Jews. Antisemitism doesn’t seem to be a bug in the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to power inside the Democratic Party, but a feature; it’s perhaps one of its most powerful energizing mechanisms.

Every Jew has wondered, at some dark hour, whether their neighbors would have hidden them from the Nazis. After elections like the recent New York primaries, that question returns in a more mundane but painful form: Would they even inconvenience themselves politically to protect us?

It can be argued that the current wave of antisemitism and its mainstream legitimization have not totally dismantled the objective conditions of American Jewish exceptionalism. America had dark patches in its history and managed to grow out of them. The country’s legal and institutional scaffolding remains largely intact, and the basic narrative of America is widely held. One can argue, as President Bill Clinton did in his first inaugural address, that “there’s nothing that is wrong with America that cannot be solved by what’s right with America.”

But the opposite can be argued as well. Both the far left and the far right in the United States seek to deconstruct the basic story of America. The former wants to present America and its history as a corrupt story of oppression; the latter falsely claims that America was founded as a “Christian Nation.”

But a debate about whether American Judaism is still exceptional would miss the point. Exceptionalism has never been a set of concrete data points, nor was it a set of policies that benefited Jews – after all, France has policies that, on paper, are more friendly to Jews, including funding Jewish schools and criminalizing antisemitic speech. It’s a gestalt: a sense of stability and belonging that led American Jewry to feel radically different from any other community in history.

The question is not the viability of Jewish Life in America. My experience in Argentina shows that Jews can thrive in both left- and right-wing populist regimes and even in an autocracy. But can they really feel at home in a country that allows those forms of government? Can they fully trust a country in which the institutions of democracy may not be strong enough to protect them?

To a certain degree, the question that Franklin Foer asked in his seminal Atlantic essay, “The Golden Age of American Jewry is Ending,” is not the right one. There can be a golden age even when Jews feel existential insecurity. What is changing is the subjective relationship many American Jews have with America.

I believe that antisemitism will recede, and things will “go back to normal,” because antisemitism always ebbs and flows. But we can’t unsee what we’ve been seeing in the last few years. What may be ending is not the Golden Age of American Jewry, if there was ever such a thing, but American Jewish exceptionalism.

American Jews will now need to look at America the way that Jews have looked at every other host country in our long exile – as a place that can turn against them at any time. Will I ever look at my neighbor the same way when, after I told her that Mamdani made me unsafe, she shrugged and voted for him anyway?

Either we were never that exceptional, or our exceptionality is not as protective as we thought. In both cases, we face a painful reckoning with reality: We are more similar to other diasporas than we ever thought.

So what are American Jews to do with this realization?

First, recognizing the truth can be liberating. Yehuda Kurtzer, CEO of the North American Hartman Institute, has urged Jews to embrace “political homelessness.” Whether or not one agrees with all his arguments, the essential insight stands. Jews should stop searching for a permanent home in either political party and begin acting as independent political agents.

Second, we must invest far more in Jewish education, identity and pride. If our place in American society is conditional, our own identity must be unconditional. Judaism — with its depth, history, and purpose — must fill the void before despair or self-rejection does.

Third, we must strengthen Zionism as a central pillar of Jewish identity; invest in Zionist education, and promote engagement with Israel, even if critical. We should remain engaged in American civic life, but it’s clear now that the American project is not, as we thought, an intrinsically Jewish project – at best, it’s a secular project in which Jews may be able to participate. The only collective Jewish project is Israel. That is not an ideological statement but a fact. That, of course, doesn’t mean blindly accepting any Israeli policy or not fighting for Palestinians’ rights. The opposite: if Israel is our only collective project, we must engage with it from the inside, defending its democracy and its liberalism and fighting against the dark forces that seek to capture it.

Finally, we must stop apologizing for defending Jewish rights. Changing hearts and minds about antisemitism is, at best, an improbable task. Antisemitism rises and falls for reasons largely beyond our control. What we can do is protect ourselves — physically, legally, politically and culturally — and use every legitimate tool available to defend our community.

Jews should stand in solidarity with other oppressed minorities because it is the right thing to do. But we should cease having naïve illusions about others standing up for us. We need to continue “building bridges” — but we need to learn when to burn them. In the case of Mamdani, for example, we’ve seen that opening the doors of Jewish institutions to him has not moderated his views. It has led him to double down. Indeed, after a rabbinical organization honored him at its gala dinner as a way of “building bridges,” Mamdani went on to call an American Zionist group “monsters.”

This American Jewish moment is painful and unsettling, but it’s an opportunity to rethink some of our basic premises and plan according to new principles. Thinking less about our exceptionalism may be liberating. Sometimes it’s good to let go. That energy used to keep aloft something that is collapsing can then be used to enrich our own identity and rediscover our tradition. Clinging to delusions won’t help — looking reality in the face just might.

One of the keys to understanding Western attitudes toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is to distinguish between Palestinians and Palestinianism.

Palestinians are a real people with legitimate rights and aspirations, both individual and collective. There is debate over when Palestinian peoplehood emerged—until well into the twentieth century, “Palestinian” functioned primarily as a geographic rather than a national designation—but that historical debate does nothing to diminish the legitimacy or urgency of Palestinian claims today. Like every other people, Palestinians deserve dignity, security, political representation, and ultimately a future they can shape for themselves.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, at its core, is therefore a geopolitical dispute: two national movements laying claim to the same land, burdened by history, trauma, and hard-to-reconcile narratives.

Palestinianism, however, is something else entirely. It is not a movement for Palestinian rights. It is a Western ideological framework that transforms Palestine from a particular political conflict into the central moral lens through which every other issue is interpreted.

The extent to which Palestinianism has colonized public life is difficult to exaggerate.

Climate movements suspend campaigns against global warming to organize demonstrations for Gaza. Pride marches become platforms for “Palestinian liberation”. Labor unions issue declarations about Israel. Literary festivals, immigration protests, museum openings, academic conferences, municipal elections, even mining festivals in Scotland suddenly discover that their central concern is Palestine. At the 2025 Durham Miners’ Gala—a celebration of Britain’s mining heritage—speakers insisted that defending British workers required “freeing Palestine.”

The underlying assumption is breathtaking in its ambition: Palestine is no longer one political conflict among many but the hidden key to all of them. Solve Palestine—or, more accurately, eliminate the Jewish state—and capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, climate change, and every other great evil suddenly disappear.

No, I’m not exaggerating. Sally Rooney recently declared that “the struggle for Palestine is also and has always been a struggle for human liberation and for our future on this earth.” Angela Davis described Palestine as “the center of the world.” The Climate Justice Alliance proclaimed that “the path to ecological justice runs through a free Palestine.”

None of these statements merely express solidarity with Palestinians or promote a realistic solution for their plight. They assign Palestine a unique symbolic role among the world’s injustices.

Of course, people are free to express solidarity with causes they consider just. Nothing is objectionable about that. But solidarity alone cannot explain why a conflict involving a tiny strip of land has acquired a symbolic centrality unmatched by wars that have killed vastly more people, displaced vastly more civilians, or reshaped the international order far more profoundly.

What we are witnessing is not solidarity but something else: The global Palestinianist movement has become so culturally powerful that Palestine functions less as a concrete political cause than as a universal symbolic language. The result is paradoxical. The more Palestine comes to stand for everything, the less attention is paid to the concrete conditions, institutions, compromises, and policies that might actually improve Palestinian lives.

The political theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe help explain how this transformation occurs.

Laclau argued that successful political movements are not built simply by accumulating protests but by weaving disparate grievances into a common narrative. Political entrepreneurs present seemingly unrelated issues as different manifestations of the same underlying structure of oppression. Laclau called this a chain of equivalence.

At the center of that chain stands what he called an empty signifier—a symbol broad enough to absorb multiple, often unrelated aspirations. Concepts such as “the people,” “justice,” or “democracy” acquire enormous political power precisely because they remain undefined. Different constituencies can project onto them their own hopes, fears, and grievances. Chantal Mouffe later emphasized that such symbols can become the master signifier, the symbolic center that gives emotional coherence to an otherwise heterogeneous coalition.

If the central symbol derives its power from being “empty,” then the same must eventually become true of its antagonist; in other words, the enemy no longer matters for what it actually does but for what it comes to represent.

Once emptied of their concrete reality, Palestine and Israel become infinitely useful. Palestinians cease to be a people and become Every Victim. Israel ceases to be a country and becomes Evil itself. The less either resembles reality, the more valuable they become as symbols.

Once this happens, the conflict itself becomes strangely irrelevant. There is little reason to study its history, understand its competing narratives, grapple with its moral ambiguities, or search for workable compromises. Accepting the complexity of this conflict threatens the very symbolic architecture that gives it power.

Indeed, peace itself becomes almost subversive. A negotiated settlement would collapse the ideological structure that Palestinianism has painstakingly constructed. Once Palestine becomes one territorial dispute among many—messy, compromised, tragic, and painfully ordinary—it can no longer function as the master metaphor of global oppression.

None of this means that Palestinians have not suffered. They have suffered enormously. Nor does it deny that Israel has often contributed to that suffering through grievous mistakes and, at times, grave injustices. Precisely because Palestinians deserve to be treated as a real people rather than as ideological raw material, they deserve something better than being endlessly recruited into Western culture wars. They deserve to be discussed as a nation with political choices, competing visions, institutions to build, leaders to hold accountable, and a future to secure.

But this raises an obvious question.

Why Palestine? Why did this conflict, and not another, become the master signifier of our age?

Some explanations are straightforward.

Modern politics rewards moral simplicity. Palestine appears to offer a perfectly symmetrical drama: oppressed versus oppressor; colonized versus colonizer; victim versus power. It is a story that can be understood instantly, compressed into a slogan, and exported to almost any political context. That simplicity, though false, is politically useful.

Palestine offers a common banner under which movements that otherwise have little in common can march together. Islamists who would imprison homosexuals suddenly become allies of LGBTQ activists. Radical feminists overlook movements whose treatment of women fundamentally contradicts their own principles. Anti-racist activists who rightly denounce ethnic massacres elsewhere suspend those concerns when the perpetrators happen to fit the preferred revolutionary narrative. Palestine allows mutually incompatible ideologies to postpone their contradictions in favor of a common enemy.

Palestine also functions less as a foreign-policy position than as a marker of moral identity. Supporting Palestine increasingly signals membership in a broader moral community. It tells others not simply what one thinks about the Middle East, but what kind of person one is. That is why Palestine appears, often incongruously, in municipal elections, school board meetings, labor disputes, academic hiring committees, and cultural institutions that possess no conceivable influence over events between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Then there is social media. Algorithms reward emotionally powerful symbols, visual narratives, and moral certainty. Palestine plays on those three dimensions. Images circulate instantly, stripped of historical context and embedded within stories that users already wish to tell about capitalism, colonialism, racism, or empire. The conflict is not merely reported; it is optimized for virality. Other tragedies—equally horrific but less photogenic, less familiar, or less useful—simply disappear beneath the algorithmic horizon.

Yet none of these explanations fully accounts for Palestinianism’s extraordinary success.

The comparison with the Uyghurs is especially revealing.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has subjected the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to one of the most extensive campaigns of repression in the contemporary world. Credible investigations have documented the mass arbitrary detention of hundreds of thousands—possibly more than a million—people in internment camps; pervasive digital surveillance through facial recognition, biometric data collection, and electronic monitoring; torture, sexual violence, and other forms of abuse in detention; forced labor programs; severe restrictions on religious practice, language, and cultural expression; the destruction of mosques, shrines, and cemeteries; the separation of children from their families into state-run boarding schools; and coercive birth-control measures, including forced sterilizations and IUD insertions.

If one were searching for a contemporary example of colonial domination, cultural destruction, mass incarceration, religious persecution, and technological authoritarianism, Xinjiang would appear to satisfy every criterion. Yet, the Uyghur cause has not colonized the Western imagination. It does not appear compulsorily at climate marches, literary festivals, Pride celebrations, labor conferences, museum openings, or municipal elections. There are no demands that every movement first declare its position on Xinjiang before discussing its own agenda.

There are, to be sure, legitimate reasons for the difference. Western governments are more deeply entangled with Israel than with China. Palestine has enjoyed decades of well-funded organized international solidarity. China has been extraordinarily successful at restricting access to Xinjiang while suppressing images and testimony.

But that still fails to explain the extraordinary symbolic value attached to Israel—the ease with which one small conflict comes to represent colonialism, capitalism, racism, militarism, policing, borders, environmental destruction, and the entire system of “Western domination”.

To understand that, one must examine not only the victim but also the antagonist.

What probably explains why Uyghurism is not a thing while Palestinianism has colonized the political imagination is that Palestinianism derives much of its symbolic power from the identity of its enemy: The Jews.

Antisemitism has never treated Jews as merely another disliked minority. It has consistently transformed them into explanatory figures. Across radically different societies and ideologies, Jews have been imagined as the embodiment of money, capitalism, communism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, rootlessness, modernity, decadence, secrecy, manipulation, finance, media, and invisible power. Whatever a civilization most feared or hated, Jews somehow came to personify. Long before Laclau described empty signifiers, Jews had already served as one for nearly two thousand years. They became the receptacle into which societies poured their anxieties, contradictions, and failures.

Israel allows this ancient symbolic structure to be translated into the moral vocabulary of the twenty-first century. The Jew is no longer imagined merely as the hidden power behind the curtains. In the figure of Israel, Jewish power becomes visible, sovereign, armed, technologically sophisticated, and therefore capable of personifying not merely one country but an entire system.

Of course, none of this means that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic, nor that every advocate for Palestinian rights is an antisemite. What it means is that Palestinianism has inherited a sort of moral structure that places “the Jew” as the embodiment of evil. Sometimes that inheritance is unconscious, sometimes it is adopted and used deliberately.

Either way, Israel becomes the state whose wrongdoings acquire a different dimension. Russia, China, Syria and Iran may commit crimes, but those crimes remain Russian, Chinese, Syrian or Iranian crimes – they aren’t made to explain the world.

The Uyghur cause is “boring” because it merely directs attention toward the Uyghurs. Palestinianism directs attention toward a theory of the world—and the historical availability of Jews as universal explanatory figures helps explain why. China may oppress a people, but Jews can still be made to explain the universe.

And that has consequences.

It hurts Israelis, certainly. It fuels a political culture in which the Jewish state is judged not by the standards applied to other nations but by standards reserved for metaphysical evil. It also hurts Jews around the world. Once Israel becomes the symbolic embodiment of global injustice, Jews inevitably become its local representatives. The oldest habit of antisemitism reasserts itself in contemporary language: Jews once again become responsible not merely for what they do but for what they supposedly represent.

But above all, Palestinianism hurts Palestinians because the actual flesh-and-blood Palestinians disappear into the symbol. They cease to be a people who need functioning institutions, accountable leadership, economic opportunity, personal security, the rule of law, and ultimately a viable state. Instead, they become the indispensable protagonists of a universal morality play, valued less for who they are than for what they signify.

Their suffering is transformed into political currency used to explain capitalism, colonialism, racism, climate change, patriarchy, and the failures of the West. But symbols cannot negotiate borders, build schools, reform governments, create jobs, attract investment, fight corruption, or make the painful compromises on which every durable peace depends.

Indeed, Palestinianism creates a perverse incentive structure.

The movement rewards theatrical maximalism over attainable improvement. It elevates slogans over institutions, symbolism over governance, permanent resistance over political responsibility. Every concession becomes betrayal. Every compromise becomes collaboration. Every practical success threatens the ideological purity of the cause.

That is why Palestinianism shows little curiosity about Palestinian political failures. Hamas’ authoritarianism, the Palestinian Authority’s corruption, the absence of democratic institutions, the suppression of dissent, the failures of governance, the fragmentation of Palestinian society—these are all awkward facts because they restore agency to Palestinians, and agency complicates the allegory.

That also explains why Palestinianism appears strangely indifferent to outcomes. If the goal were primarily to improve Palestinian lives, one would expect an obsessive interest in economic development, institutional reform, educational achievement, anti-corruption measures, diplomatic breakthroughs, and the difficult work of preparing a society for statehood.

Instead, the movement overwhelmingly rewards symbolic confrontation. The greatest prestige accrues not to those who improve Palestinian lives but to those who most effectively dramatize Palestinian victimhood. Consider Greta Thunberg. She has become one of the world’s most recognizable faces of the Palestinian cause. Yet it is difficult to identify a single concrete improvement in the daily lives of Palestinians that resulted from her activism. Her flotilla generated headlines, photographs, and social-media engagement, but it did not open a border crossing, build a school, create a job, reform a Palestinian institution, or bring the parties any closer to peace. That is a feature and not a bug: Palestinianism produces political capital for the activists, and virtually nothing for the Palestinians.

The result is that Palestinians become indispensable to the movement precisely insofar as they remain unresolved. A Palestine at peace with Israel would matter profoundly to Palestinians, but it would be catastrophic for Palestinianism.

None of this is an argument against supporting Palestinian rights. On the contrary. It is an argument for taking Palestinians seriously enough to refuse their transformation into ideological mascots of Western radicals. Peoples are not metaphors and nations aren’t allegories.

As Palestinian writer and analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote: “I, and many others… struggle to find a political home in today’s pro-Palestine movement. (That movement) is dominated by maximalists, zero-sum positions, slogan-driven voices and narratives. Pro-Palestine activism has been reduced to incendiary language that fails to capture the multiple moving parts of what is needed to advance the just and urgent Palestinian aspirations… they can’t present viable and pragmatic ideas that are not mere rhetorical statements.”

Every time Palestinianism colonizes another unrelated issue, the vicious cycle deepens, and the more actual Palestinians like Ahmed suffer. Because the more indispensable Palestine becomes to every Western argument, the more dispensable actual Palestinians become.

This post is probably my most personal one so far. While visiting Buenos Aires, I had many thoughts about having multiple identities, diverse allegiances, and internal conflicts and contradictions.

And yet, one remains indelibly marked by the place in which one was born, even when being multi-cultural and feeling at home in the world.

Thinking about that, a poem by Shaul Tchernichovsky came to my mind: “Ha’adam eino ela tavnit eretz moladeto” - Man is nothing but the landscape of the land where he was born.

Tchernichovsky, like me, was a fervent Zionist. Like me, he left his birthplace. And yet, in the Land of Israel, he saw with a mixture of pride and longing that the landscape of his youth had shaped him. Paradoxically, he also discovered that he could be at peace in the world by having a clear idea of who he was and how he come to be that way. That discovery helped him open up to the world, and to new lives across the sea.

I thought I’d share with you this poem - and invite your own reflections about how your childhood landscapes and experiences shaped you. And what path lies ahead in your journey.

The poem is in the public domain, and the translation is mine, so forgive any awkward wording!

Enjoy!

Man Is Nothing But...
Shaul Tchernichovsky

Man is but a little plot of earth;
for Man is nothing but the landscape of the land where he was born.
Only what his ears absorbed while still fresh,
only what his eyes drank in before they had their fill of seeing;
all that the child encountered on dew-covered paths,
stumbling and wavering over every clod and mound of earth…

Only later, through the struggle of life,
as the scroll of his days slowly unfolds,
does he discover how deeply those first visions shaped him,
how they continue to live within him;
for Man is nothing but the landscape of the land where he was born...

And there, in that corner of the earth where I was born,
across the vast blue steppe, there dream
ancient sacred altars beside wondrous burial mounds…

And there, in that corner of the earth where I was born,
humble flowers and simple grasses grow;
the wind sings its ancient songs,
and the larks pour out their music into the sky.
Everything I breathed there in childhood
has remained with me forever, inseparable,
as fragrance remains with the flower.

Just as that place where I was born,
so too was my soul fashioned.
Even now, though my feet wander distant lands
and new landscapes awaken my wonder,
the first image of my homeland remains within me,
quiet and faithful,
for Man is nothing but the landscape of the land where he was born

And yet—more horizons, and more roads!
Let the heart still long for new worlds.
For whoever truly knows the land of his birth
is also able to open himself
to all the beauty of the world.

I have always been fascinated by the story of Hannah Senesh, who was part of the group of 32 parachutists from Mandatory Palestine that landed in Nazi-dominated Europe to fight the Germans and attempt to save Jews. I remember my mother telling me those stories and my elementary school teachers waxing admiringly about the parachutists’ courage. The passing down of this story became multi-generational when my own children attended the Hannah Senesh School in New York.

Yet one thing I hadn’t been told as a child was how little the mission actually accomplished. The parachutists didn’t kill a single Nazi or save a single Jew. Most were captured by the Gestapo and killed, Senesh among them. By any military reckoning, it was an utter failure.

Or was it?

Matti Friedman refuses to call it one. In his book Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, he argues that the parachutists’ action was never really about the mission but about the story. In a moment when Jews appeared almost entirely as objects of history—deported, trapped, murdered—the parachutists enacted a radically different Jewish posture. They put on uniforms, boarded aircraft, crossed borders, and voluntarily returned to Europe to fight. They could not reverse the Holocaust, but they represented Jews returning to what Friedman calls the “world of action.” They were not merely trying to save Jews; they were demonstrating what the new Jew was supposed to do when confronted with catastrophe: not wait, petition or despair, but act. The parachutists succeeded in that they provided an example for an entire generation that would soon need to fight for the establishment of the State of Israel.

As we commemorate Tisha Be’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, the story of the parachutists becomes informative.

Tisha Be’Av asks an almost unbearable question: What does a people do when its world is collapsing?

The Temple was not merely the holiest of buildings. It was the axis around which Jewish religious, political, and national life revolved. Its destruction in the year 70 was therefore more than a military defeat. It was the collapse of an entire form of Jewish existence. Jerusalem was devastated, sovereignty was extinguished, the sacrificial service ceased, and the organizing center of Jewish life disappeared.

Out of that catastrophe emerged two very different Jewish responses. Some Jews refused to surrender and moved into Masada, an almost inaccessible desert fortress where they resisted the Romans for three years. When defeat was inevitable, they chose collective suicide over captivity. Simultaneously, as Jerusalem fell, Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakay managed to escape the city with a group of disciples and then negotiated with the Romans to establish a new Sanhedrin in the small city of Yavne.

These are two paradigmatic responses. Masada declared that there are defeats one must resist even when victory is impossible. Yavne taught that when one form of Jewish life becomes impossible, Judaism must find another.

At first glance, they appear to be opposites. Masada is heroic, militant, uncompromising. Yavne is cautious, pragmatic, conciliatory. Masada chooses dignity over survival; Yavne chooses survival despite humiliation. One ends in death on a desert mountain. The other preserves Judaism through scholarship and learning.

Many scholars have pitted Masada against Yavne, forcefully arguing for one or the other. But what if Jewish history and continuity need both, even if not necessarily in equal measure or in the same way?

The Jewish people survived because of Yavne, not Masada. But Masada, recovered and transformed into myth by later generations, ensured that survival would not become the entirety of Jewish aspiration. Yavne taught us how to live after defeat. Masada reminded us that defeat must not become our permanent condition.

On the whole, the Talmud, sides with Yohanan ben Zakkai, not with the fighters who died at Masada. It all but ignores the story of Masada, wary of glorifying a doomed rebellion and encouraging another. And it had little reason to romanticize the rebels: many were part of the Sicarii, a group known for being violent and intransigent. But the Talmud also shows the ambiguity of the sages of the time. Rabbi Yosef, or according to another version, Rabbi Akiva, sharply criticizes Ben Zakai for being willing to compromise too much with the Romans. All the same, Yohanan ben Zakkai understood something his revolutionary contemporaries did not. When everything cannot be saved, one must decide what can still carry the whole.

Yavne was geographically insignificant. Spiritually and historically, it became a vessel into which Judaism could contract without disappearing. The Temple could no longer organize Jewish life, so Torah, prayer, law, study, memory, and communal practice would have to assume much of its burden. Judaism became more portable. Authority moved, gradually and unevenly, from priests and sacrifices toward sages and texts. To be sure, the rabbis didn’t declare Jerusalem or the Temple obsolete; they placed its absence at the center of Jewish life. They preserved Jerusalem by teaching Jews how to live without it while never accepting that its loss was meaningless. That was the genius of Yavne: adaptation without amnesia.

Yet, adaptation contains its own danger. A people can become so skilled at surviving that survival becomes its only ideal. It can learn to accommodate every ruler, endure every indignity, and explain every defeat as another opportunity for spiritual creativity. Flexibility, which begins as a strategy, can become an identity. Powerlessness can be transformed from a condition into a virtue. Yavne can teach a people to bend without breaking. But a people that bends indefinitely may eventually forget what it was trying not to break.

And that’s the importance of Masada.

While Yavne became the template of Jewish adaptation, the story of Masada wasn’t forgotten. It had, and still has, an important afterlife. Modern Zionism rediscovered it and fashioned it into a story about courage, armed resistance, and the rejection of Jewish helplessness. The Masada that animated twentieth-century Jewish imagination was therefore not simply an archaeological site or a literal retelling of Josephus. It was an inspiring moral resource, a call to defiance and a commitment to agency and dignity.

The message of Masada today is that not every compromise is wisdom. Not every accommodation is creativity. Not every form of survival is worthy of celebration. A people must possess red lines—things it will not relinquish even when relinquishing them appears prudent. Masada helped produce a new Jewish self-image: not simply the Jew who outlasts his enemies, but the Jew who resists them; not merely the Jew who survives history, but the Jew who seeks to act within it. It says, especially after the holocaust, that Jews would no longer regard catastrophe as something to be endured and interpreted only after the fact. They would, like Hannah Senesh, assume responsibility for preventing it.

And yet, Masada, too, contains a terrible danger.

Resistance can become theatrical. Purity can become more important than responsibility. Leaders may prefer a glorious defeat to an imperfect compromise because defeat preserves their moral grandeur, whereas compromise requires them to live with uncertainty and criticism.

Masada without Yavne romanticizes the last stand. It forgets that the purpose of courage is not to create beautiful deaths but to protect meaningful lives. It can turn sacrifice from a tragic necessity into a political temptation. A leader is not entitled to choose Masada for an entire people merely because he finds Yavne humiliating.

And that is why we need both traditions, each limiting the excesses of the other.

Judaism should always ask two questions: What can still be saved, and what must never be surrendered? Yavne reminds us that survival often requires flexibility, patience, institutional creativity, and the acceptance of partial victories. Masada reminds us that survival purchased at the cost of all dignity, agency, and purpose may become an empty achievement.

Facing the many challenges that the Jewish people face today, every fanatic believes that the hour of Masada has arrived, and every appeaser believes there is always another Yavne available. The rest of us need to live with an unbearable uncertainty because history does not place convenient signs to announce when compromise has become surrender or when resistance has become suicide.

But that uncertainty is not an argument for choosing one tradition and discarding the other. It’s an argument about what’s most difficult and most necessary: holding both in tension.

The story of Masada, like that of the parachutists, is important not because it succeeded, but because it enlarged the range of actions that later generations could imagine themselves performing. But Yavne teaches that courage without prudence can consume the very future it claims to defend

May this Tisha Be’Av, with its load of sorrow and tragedy, and with its renewed fear of destruction and dissolution, inspire us to act with both wisdom and determination in the face of uncertainty.

Jewish communities have often persuaded themselves that there was a peculiar affinity between Judaism and the countries in which they’ve had made their home. German Jews built an entire philosophy around that conviction. In 1915, Hermann Cohen wrote an essay entitled Deutschtum und Judentum—Germanness and Jewishness—arguing that the ethical aspirations of Germany and Judaism were not merely compatible but profoundly consonant. French Jews found a similar harmony between Judaism and the universal ideals of the Republic. American Jews went further still; they saw the American experiment as the materialization of traits that were eminently Jewish, like freedom of conscience, pluralism and the immigrant experience.

I always regarded these exercises with the affectionate skepticism one reserves for other people’s provincial vanities. Every Jewish community, it seemed, eventually convinced itself that its adopted country was uniquely attuned to the Jewish experience. Then, Argentina became the villain of the World Cup, and I caught myself doing exactly the same thing.

Not because the hostility directed at a successful football team is remotely comparable to antisemitism—it isn’t—but because I suddenly recognized the same intellectual mechanism at work. It appears that Argentines and Jews are guilty of the same thing: the refusal of reality to fit into neat ideological categories.

That realization came gradually. At first, the accusations against Argentina were almost funny. Figures whose rhetoric about Israel and Jews has long relied on antisemitic tropes suddenly discovered an intense interest in FIFA refereeing. Disputed VAR decisions became evidence that Argentina was “protected.” Lionel Messi ceased to be merely the greatest footballer of his generation and became the beneficiary of a vast political conspiracy. Somewhere between Argentina’s victory over Egypt and its defeat of Switzerland, the defending world champion stopped being a football team and became a theory of history. Argentina’s victories became evidence of colonial privilege, white supremacy, Zionism, FIFA corruption, and American hegemony. In one especially imaginative if predictable version, a conspiracy linking Lionel Messi, Javier Milei, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad. Football has always inspired paranoia. But this was something different. Ninety minutes of sport had become a complete explanation of the world.

That was the moment I stopped laughing.

One grows accustomed to conspiracy theories about Jews. They are as old as the Diaspora itself. But why should Argentina provoke the same style of thinking? Why, as I write this, are commentators steeped in post-colonial theory openly rooting for England—a nation that built the largest colonial empire in history—against Argentina in the name of anti-colonialism? Why has Argentina suddenly become the embodiment of whiteness, colonialism, and privilege?

The answer, I think, lies deeper than football and concerns the essence of totalitarianism.

Extremist ideologies require clean moral categories. Oppressor and oppressed. Colonizer and colonized. White and brown. Victim and victimizer. Virtuous and guilty. Their power depends upon the assumption that every individual and every nation can be assigned, once and for all, to one side of these binaries. The categories are not merely descriptive; they become moral descriptors.

If the totalitarian worldview is based on immutable categories, its true enemy is not the dissenter, but the exception.

Argentina is one such exception. It belongs unmistakably to the Global South. Economically, politically, and historically, it has experienced many of the challenges associated with the developing world. Yet culturally, it bears the unmistakable imprint of Europe. It is a nation built largely by immigrants—Italians, Spaniards, Jews, Poles, Russians, Irish and many others—whose descendants today are often perceived as “white.” It was shaped by colonialism, yet contemporary Argentines do not resemble the archetypal colonized people imagined by post-colonial theory. They are too European to fit comfortably into the progressive imagination of Latin America, yet too Latin American ever to be regarded as fully European, as countless Argentines dismissed as sudacas in Spain have discovered.

Nor does Argentina fit comfortably into contemporary narratives of victimhood. It welcomed millions of immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution. Its Constitution famously extends “the benefits of liberty... to all the people of the world who wish to inhabit Argentine soil.” Yet because so many of those refugees happened to be the aforementioned Europeans, their suffering has become strangely invisible within today’s racialized moral vocabulary.

Argentina irritates because it cannot be placed in a neat box on the ideological map, and thus proves that the map itself is inadequate.

This becomes especially apparent in the language of identity politics. We are constantly asked to declare “where we are speaking from,” whether our experience is one of privilege or oppression, whether we occupy the position of colonizer or colonized. To an Argentine, these dichotomies are almost impossible to answer. The categories overlap. They contradict one another. They refuse to produce a single moral identity, thus committing the cardinal sin against extremism – the refusal to be neatly categorized.

And that, I suspect, is the point of contact with anti-Jewish hatred.

Jews are glitches in the matrix. They are too white for the radical left and too non-white for the radical right. They are undeniably victims of one of history’s longest and most persistent hatreds, yet they also possess agency and power, which means they no longer fit comfortably into modern narratives in which the victim is always powerless. They are a religion, but not merely a religion; a nation, but not merely a nation; an ethnicity, a civilization, a culture, and a people, none of which adequately defines them on its own.

Like Argentina, the Jews are an exception, and exceptions expose bad theories, like the anomalies in planetary orbits that ended up showing that the geocentric paradigm was wrong and the Sun didn’t revolve around the Earth.

That is why extremists hate anomalies more than they hate their enemies. The existence of a people that escapes their conceptual boxes threatens something far more important than a political argument. It threatens the categories themselves, and thus their entire conceptual edifice.

Totalitarian thinking does not merely classify the world – after all, every system classifies reality. The distinctive feature of totalitarianism is that it moralizes and essentializes those classifications. It transforms descriptive categories into immutable moral identities. Once a person has been assigned to the right box, every action becomes evidence of a predetermined essence.

If the world is divided neatly between oppressors and oppressed, what does one do with a people who have been victims of relentless persecution yet have also rebuilt their national life? If history is simply a struggle between colonizers and colonized, what does one do with a nation like Argentina, born from European immigration, shaped by mestizaje (people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry), scarred by colonialism, and yet unmistakably part of the Global South? Every exception weakens the explanatory power of the ideology. Every ambiguity exposes the inadequacy of the theory itself.

And that is why totalitarians consider complexity itself subversive.

Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarianism “strives... to transform human nature itself.” That ambition begins by denying the most obvious fact about human beings: that they are irreducibly plural. But the totalitarian mind cannot tolerate this. It demands that one identity eclipse all the others. Everything else becomes secondary, if not illegitimate.

History provides many examples. The Nazi regime reduced millions of people to racial categories from which there could be no escape. Conversion, patriotism, military service, cultural achievement—none of it mattered. Jewishness was transformed from one aspect of a person’s identity into his entire essence. Stalin’s Soviet Union committed a similar reduction, though in the language of class rather than race. Entire populations were labeled “kulaks,” “bourgeois elements,” or “reactionaries,” rendering individual biographies irrelevant. Once the category had been assigned, the person disappeared.

Isaiah Berlin captured the danger with characteristic precision: “To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.” Uniforms erase distinctions. They replace individual lives with collective identities. They promise clarity at the cost of truth, and in many cases, at the cost of life itself.

Reality, however, is stubbornly untidy. People belong to many communities at once. They have conflicting loyalties, evolve over time, inherit contradictory traditions, and often refuse to fit neatly into the categories devised by political ideologies. Nations are no different. They are mixtures of conquest and refuge, triumph and tragedy, memory and reinvention. They cannot be reduced to a single moral essence any more than individuals can.

This is, ultimately, what distinguishes liberal democracy from totalitarianism.

Liberal democracy does not deny the existence of categories, but it denies their finality. It recognizes that human beings are more than their race, class, religion, nationality, or any other single attribute. It assumes that political institutions must accommodate this ambiguity rather than abolish it. Totalitarianism works in the opposite way. It seeks certainty through simplification. It divides the world into mutually exclusive camps and insists that reality conforms to the scheme. When reality refuses, it is reality—not the ideology—that must be suppressed.

That is why totalitarian movements invariably become coercive. If people refuse to inhabit the identities assigned to them, they must be pressured, shamed, reeducated, excluded, or, in the darkest chapters of history, physically eliminated. The progression is all but inevitable. A worldview built on rigid identities cannot tolerate those who escape them.

Jews and Argentines, each in their own very different way, have become reminders that reality is more complicated than ideology allows. Neither can be adequately described by the moral binaries that increasingly dominate our political discourse. Neither fits comfortably into the role assigned by those who insist on viewing history as a struggle between immutable categories. Their very existence challenges the idea that identity can be reduced to a single defining characteristic.

For that reason, neither Jews nor Argentines should surrender the definition of who they are to those determined to flatten them into ideological caricatures. They should resist the temptation to simplify themselves in order to satisfy the expectations of others, whether those expectations come wrapped in admiration or hostility. They should not apologize for their complexity, but affirm it. Their strength lies precisely in what totalitarian minds find intolerable: their layered histories, their multiple loyalties, their capacity to belong to more than one world at once.

Abstract

The prevailing scientific consensus holds that Argentine football cábalas—ritualized acts performed by supporters under the belief that they influence the outcome of a match—possess no causal efficacy. We argue that this conclusion, while intuitively attractive, rests upon an outdated understanding of causality inherited from nineteenth-century mechanics. Drawing upon quantum indeterminacy, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, complexity science, and decision theory, we demonstrate that the impossibility of cábalas has never been empirically established. We further propose that, under certain conditions, a supporter wearing an unwashed 1986 jersey may exert a measurable, if presently incalculable, influence upon Lionel Messi’s finishing accuracy.

Introduction

Science advances by questioning certainties. The Earth ceased to be the center of the universe. Time ceased to be absolute. Matter dissolved into probabilities. Space learned to curve.

Only one certainty has remained untouched by modernity:

That my uncle Osvaldo, standing throughout ninety minutes with his left foot on a plastic stool, has absolutely no effect on Argentina’s chances of winning.

This paper asks whether that confidence is justified.

The question is not whether cábalas do work. That would require evidence.

The question is whether contemporary physics still permits us to affirm, with Newtonian confidence, that they cannot.

1. The Collapse of Linear Physics

For nearly three centuries, the universe resembled an impeccable Swiss watch. Every event possessed a proportional cause. Every effect followed predictably from previous conditions. Within such a cosmos, cábalas deserved nothing but ridicule.

But twentieth-century physics challenged that notion and created a universe in which that proposition cannot be advanced with full confidence.

In the 1920s, following Heisenberg and Bohr’s uncertainty principle, Quantum mechanics informs us that certainty is replaced by probability.

Later, chaos theory suggests that microscopic perturbations can produce macroscopic consequences.

Complexity theory informs us that systems composed of many interacting agents generate outcomes that no individual component could predict.

The universe, it seems, has become hospitable to improbable propositions. In fact, modern physics is based upon that very hospitality.

2. The Butterfly Wears an Argentina Jersey

Edward Lorenz famously discovered that infinitesimal differences in initial conditions can radically alter future trajectories.

A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may, metaphorically speaking, contribute to a tornado in Texas. The flapping of wings creates an imperceptible disturbance in the surrounding air. That tiny fluctuation slightly alters the movement of nearby air molecules, which subtly modifies local pressure and temperature gradients. As winds transport those disturbances, they interact with countless other atmospheric currents, each amplifying or redirecting the previous ones. Days later, the accumulated differences have shifted the precise position, timing, or intensity of a storm system. Under the right conditions, what would otherwise have been an ordinary thunderstorm becomes a tornado—or a tornado forms a few miles east instead of west.

The scientific community accepted this proposition – a chain reaction of cause and effect has a non-linear impact on reality, and that is very difficult to predict with accuracy. That is why even today, weather forecasts lose accuracy for forecasts longer than a week.

Curiously, the same community refuses to entertain the possibility that changing from the blue jersey to the white jersey before kickoff might influence the trajectory of a football.

This asymmetry deserves explanation.

If a butterfly modifies atmospheric pressure by an immeasurable amount, then so does an Argentine supporter standing instead of sitting.

His lungs displace air differently.

His heartbeat changes.

His floor vibrates.

His dog chooses another place to sleep.

Nothing in physics permits these consequences to remain exactly zero.

How significant they are is a different question – but their significance is not nil.

3. The Quantum Defense

Quantum mechanics has suffered greatly at the hands of mystics, wellness influencers, and airport bookstores.

We therefore proceed cautiously.

No interpretation of quantum mechanics presently accepted by physicists concludes that consciousness creates goals against Egypt.

Nevertheless, quantum theory establishes something profoundly inconvenient:

The universe, at its deepest level, is not the deterministic machine imagined by Laplace.

The future is described by probabilities.

This observation does not prove cábalas.

It merely removes one classical objection to them.

Newton would have dismissed the Argentine grandmother who insists on knitting silently during penalties.

Quantum mechanics merely declines to testify because there is indeed, a universe in which that has knitting has an impact on the game.

4. The Nonlinear Transmission Hypothesis

Suppose a supporter performs the ritual of refusing to answer his telephone the morning of a game

As a consequence:

His wife answers instead.

She speaks longer than he would have.

The caller departs later.

Traffic patterns shift imperceptibly.

The team bus reaches the stadium twenty-four seconds later.

A television technician is delayed as well; he is in a bad mood and inadvertently blocks for ten seconds the warm-up of a substitute.

In those ten seconds a foul is committed, a free kick is given and Messi scores.

Argentina advances.

Each individual step appears ridiculous.

Collectively, they constitute nothing more exotic than a causal chain.

The difficulty lies not in imagining such chains.

It lies in calculating them.

The equations required exceed current computational capacities, though perhaps not those of future civilizations or particularly obsessive Argentine statisticians.

5. On the Ontology of Lucky Jerseys

Classical science asks whether the jersey possesses mystical properties.

This paper rejects that primitive formulation.

The jersey need not contain magic.

It need only alter the physical configuration of the universe by an infinitesimal amount.

A different shirt includes different fibers.

Different fibers alter temperature.

Temperature alters perspiration.

Perspiration alters mood.

Mood alters speech.

Speech alters conversations.

Conversations alter decisions, even distant ones.

Decisions alter history.

Every revolution begins with something considerably smaller than a revolution.

6. Bayesian Considerations

Bayesian reasoning suggests another reason to sustain cabalas. Bayes would claim that, in the absence of conclusive disconfirming evidence, repeated coincidences should incrementally update our confidence rather than compel its wholesale abandonment.

Suppose the probability that a cábala influences a World Cup final equals one in ten trillion.

Suppose further that performing the ritual requires only refusing to wash one’s socks.

Expected utility calculations become unexpectedly favorable.

Economists routinely insure against events less probable than this.

Bayesian statistics does not require us to believe that cábalas work; it merely insists that every time Argentina wins while I wear the same sweater, rationality demands I become ever so slightly more reluctant to wash it.

Argentine supporters merely diversify their metaphysical portfolios.

7. The Economic Utility Argument

Economists have long recognized that rationality is not about certainty but expected utility. Daniel Bernoulli, later formalized by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, showed that one should weigh both probabilities and consequences. If the cost of wearing an old Maradona jersey is essentially zero, while the benefit—even if attached to an infinitesimal probability—is nothing less than lifting the World Cup, abandoning the ritual begins to look less like scientific skepticism than like an irrational rejection of positive expected value.

Discussion

At this point, a critic will object that millions of contradictory cábalas occur simultaneously.

One supporter refuses to watch.

Another insists on watching.

One drinks mate.

Another avoids mate.

Some wear Maradona’s number ten.

Others consider it disastrous after 1994.

How can incompatible rituals all be necessary?

This criticism presupposes that reality follows Euclidian patterns, when in fact it resembles Borges’s stories, informed by the multiverse theories. In one of his stories, every decision generates branching worlds. Somewhere, inevitably, exists the universe in which my cousin Gustavo remained seated throughout extra time and Argentina lost on penalties. Somewhere else lies the universe where he stood precisely when ordered by my aunt and Gonzalo Montiel converted the decisive kick. Science, with regrettable parsimony, grants us access to only one branch. The supporter, lacking multiversal instrumentation, naturally assumes that the branch in which victory occurred validates the ritual that preceded it.

The experimental evidence is therefore incurably incomplete.

Conclusion

We have not demonstrated that cábalas determine football matches.

That would be impossible, not because that relation doesn’t exist, but because it exceed the technical capabilities of contemporary science. Science has not yet devised instruments or theorems to map the entire cause and effect chains of cabalas.

We have merely shown that modern science has made the universe sufficiently strange that proving their impossibility has become surprisingly difficult.

There remains, admittedly, one objection.

No experiment has ever compared two identical World Cup finals differing only in whether my uncle Raúl wore his lucky sweater.

Until such controlled trials become available, intellectual honesty obliges us to suspend judgment.

Accordingly, the authors will continue occupying the same chair used during the 2022 World Cup, declining to answer telephone calls after the seventy-fifth minute, refusing to wash the aforementioned sweater, and asking reviewers to refrain from introducing unnecessary perturbations into the experimental protocol.

For science.

Fans of the Argentine national team are used to suffering, but nothing compares to the succession of heart attacks they endured while watching the epic World Cup match against Egypt.

For those of you who live inside a bottle of yogurt and don’t know what happened, here’s the deal: Argentina was down 2–0 with only 11 minutes to go. Messi had missed a penalty, and it seemed there was no way Argentina would qualify. Indeed, the statistical probability of Messi’s team winning was 0.6 percent. And yet, the Scaloneta turned it around and won 3–2. The star himself scored an incredible goal and assisted another.

In the face of that unlikely upset, the Egyptian coach, Hossam Hassan, expressed no self-criticism at all. Instead, he blamed an imaginary FIFA conspiracy aimed at keeping Argentina in the game. In his words, Egypt was the victim of an injustice perpetrated by the referee at the behest of the powers that be. Of course, many in the Arab world imagined that conspiracy to be Jewish (the referee’s Wikipedia page, for example, was altered to present him as Jewish). The reality is much simpler: when you play the world champions and a player who, even old and demoralized, is among the greatest of all time, a temporary distraction can cost you the game.

These deflections may sound like an extreme case of sore losing, but they are, I believe, indicative of deep-seated cultural patterns that sink countries, societies, and even entire civilizations into failure and underdevelopment.

Bernard Lewis best theorized this approach. In his book What Went Wrong?, he asks how Islamic civilization, which had conquered half the known world, taken the great prize of Constantinople, and even reached the gates of Vienna, began to lose ground to the West; and how, to this day, countries that used to be imperial centers, like Egypt or Iraq, are beset by poverty, corruption, and chronic underdevelopment.

For Lewis, Egypt’s coach explains it.

When defeat becomes undeniable, societies face a choice. They can ask: “What did we do wrong?” That question leads to comparison, reform, institutional learning, and imitation of successful practices. Or they can ask: “Who did this to us?” That question leads outward: conspiracies, traitors, foreign plots, hidden enemies, humiliation narratives. In Lewis’s telling, the healthier periods of Ottoman and Middle Eastern reform began when leaders asked something like: What are Europeans doing better? How are they training armies? How are they organizing states? How are they producing science, weapons, ships, finance, and administration?

Sadly, Lewis observed, the dominant tendency in much of the Arab world was the opposite: the “who did this to us” mentality. And that — this is me, not Lewis — can be seen in attitudes toward Israel. In 1950, Israel’s GDP per capita was only about twice Iraq’s and less than twice Morocco’s. Today, however, Israel’s GDP per capita is more than eleven times Iraq’s and nearly thirteen times Morocco’s, and almost eighteen times Egypt’s. When confronted with this reality, the reaction is often to accuse others of conspiracy: “Dark forces helped Israel and damaged us.”

For Lewis, the decisive difference is not whether a society suffers humiliation. Inevitably, all do. The question is whether humiliation is metabolized into healthy inquiry or into resentment. One leads to learning and growth; the other to stagnation and decline.

A society that asks “What are they doing right?” can still be proud. Lewis notes that the Ottoman reformers who studied European military drill, artillery, naval power, translation, diplomacy, and statecraft were not saying, “We are worthless.” They were saying, “We are behind in specific ways, and those ways can be studied.” That is a learning posture. More precisely, what Argyris and Schon call a double-loop posture: the willingness to revise not merely tactics, but assumptions.

But “Who did this to us?” has a different structure. It preserves innocence. It protects the group from the pain of self-examination. It turns failure from an event requiring correction into a crime requiring accusation. And the emotional payoff is enormous: if someone else did this to us, then we do not have to ask what habits, institutions, doctrines, leadership failures, or blind spots made us vulnerable.

That is the deep Lewisian point: conspiracy theory is not merely a false explanation; it is anti-learning.

Lewis, as you can imagine, is not very popular among postcolonial academics who blame colonialism for all the world’s ills. But he is also grossly misunderstood. Lewis was not denying that imperialism had pernicious effects on the Arab world, or that resources were exploited and plundered. Referees do make mistakes, and FIFA is not exactly a paragon of virtue. His point, however, was different. He noted that these societies did not ask how they — who used to be colonizers of much of the world — had become the colonized. They looked for culprits instead of asking what “they are doing right” and what “we are doing wrong.”

But before piling on Hossam Hassan, we should look in the mirror and see how our leaders and our societies are going dangerously down the same path. Both America and Israel succeeded because they were founded on the right question: How can we improve? Even when Jewish victimization was real, Zionism’s main conceptual leap was to move Jews from being objects of history to its protagonists. It was not about “what happens to us,” but about “what we do.”

Lewis’s argument is not just useful for analyzing the Muslim world. It is also useful for understanding the dynamics of decline in general. What he describes is a universal political temptation into which Western democracies themselves are now falling.

The politics of decline begins when leadership ceases to be the art of responsibility and becomes the art of deflection. A serious leader, after failure, asks: What did I miss? What did my institutions fail to see? What assumptions proved false? What must change so this does not happen again? A decadent leader asks: Who betrayed me? Who sabotaged us? Which enemy, elite, court, media, bureaucracy, immigrant, foreigner, general, expert, or internal traitor can be made to carry the blame?

In that light, Lewis’s argument should not be read as a complacent Western judgment on the Muslim world. It should be read as a warning about any society that rewards exoneration over learning. The mechanism he described — the movement from self-interrogation to accusation — is now visible across the democratic world. Candidates win not by assuming responsibility, but by perfecting the rhetoric of innocence. They lose elections because the system was rigged. They fail in office because the “deep state” obstructed them. They mishandle crises because experts misled them, judges constrained them, journalists lied about them, or enemies within betrayed the nation.

Donald Trump is the most obvious American example. His political genius lies not only in grievance but in a kind of totalized non-responsibility. Every failure is evidence of sabotage; every defeat proof of fraud; every criticism confirmation of persecution. His appeal depends on converting accountability into victimhood. Even when holding the most powerful office in the world, he speaks as though power belongs to someone else and he is merely the tribune of the dispossessed against hidden forces. During the COVID crisis, when asked about failures in testing, he famously said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” That sentence was not an accident. It was a political theology.

Benjamin Netanyahu offers a different, Israeli version of the same pathology. After October 7, the deepest failure in the history of the State of Israel, the question that should have dominated public life was not only how Hamas did this, but how Israel’s political, military, intelligence, and strategic leadership allowed it to happen. Yet Netanyahu has taken no personal responsibility and has repeatedly resisted establishing an independent state commission of inquiry, offering spurious excuses. The real problem is that leaders who base their appeal on grievance cannot allow themselves to admit failure even once, because once they do, the “it’s never my fault” narrative collapses.

But it would be facile — and false — to blame it all on our leaders. Leaders reflect their societies, and the problem is institutional and social. Leaders who refuse responsibility can survive because the public rewards them for it. Personal character plays a role, of course, but Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here” sign would be politically suicidal today. The truth is that a society that wants truth demands inquiry. A society that wants exoneration accepts enemies in place of explanations. The public is therefore not merely deceived by leaders of deflection; it collaborates with them. It asks to be protected from the knowledge that would require painful and difficult change.

Martin Gurri, who says that this brand of politics was also used by Obama in his second presidential campaign, expands on this in his seminal book The Revolt of the Public. There, he explains how digital and social media make this problem worse because the digital public is extraordinarily good at denunciation. It can expose, mock, delegitimize, and destroy. But denunciation is not the same as diagnosis. It is one thing to say that somebody failed; it is another to build institutions that do not fail in the same way. The politics of denunciation asks: Who must be exposed? Who must be punished? Who must be humiliated? The politics of learning asks: What system produced this failure, and what must replace it?

The real danger, for the Egyptian soccer team and for us, is the collapse of responsibility into blame. Blaming others is not learning. Blame identifies a culprit, but it does not repair a system.

A society in decline is not one that has enemies. Every society has enemies. It is one that allows the existence of enemies to abolish the obligation of self-examination. As a society, we cannot allow our leaders to replace learning with finger-pointing and self-absolution. It is on us, not on them.

It is psychologically much harder to admit that our mistakes made us lose a game we were 99.4 percent certain we would win than to blame a conspiracy. Taking no responsibility, deflecting, and imagining betrayal protect fragile egos. Alas, we have more valuable things to protect.

When Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfuss was falsely accused of treason, he ignited one of the most famous crises in modern French history. France divided itself between Dreyfussards (pro-Dreyfuss) and Anti-Dreyfussards, and the drama lasted for years, until Dreyfuss was cleared and rehabilitated.

The role of intellectuals in that heated time is well-known. Emile Zola’s famous piece “J’accuse…!” became a template for denouncing injustice, discrimination, and state-sponsored lies. Less known today is another Dreyfussard thinker, Julien Benda. His insight, however, may be more relevant for our times.

Benda’s main concern wasn’t public opinion or corrupt political leaders but his fellow intellectuals: writers, scholars, and moralists who claimed to serve truth, but instead allowed their ideas to become servants of faction, passion, and prejudice.

In his most important book, called The Treason of the Intellectuals, Benda shows how intellectuals claim to believe in universal principles, but then betray those principles in the service of political agendas, bigotry, and xenophobia. His most devastating quote is “Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.”

Benda was an anti-nationalist because he believed nationalist passions tempted intellectuals to bend universal principles. He was not, therefore, an easy ally of Zionism (or Palestinian nationalism). But that is precisely why he is useful. Benda’s demand was consistency. If one claims to believe in a universal principle, one cannot suspend it the moment it becomes inconvenient to one’s political or ideological agenda.

We can analyze contemporary progressive antizionism in light of Benda’s demand. Anti-Israel activists have probably never heard of Benda, but they often denounce progressive Zionists using a version of his argument. They have coined the phrase “progressive except for Palestine” to describe Jews and others whom they accuse of hypocrisy. The phrase is used not merely to criticize them, but often to exclude them from progressive spaces altogether.

The issue is not that progressives criticize Israel, but that principles advertised as universal — believe victims, reject collective blame, honor lived experience, judge speech by impact, oppose dehumanization, respect self-determination — are applied passionately in every case except the Jewish one. As with much contemporary pseudo-progressivism, however, every accusation is a confession. The real problem is often the reverse. It is not Jews who abandon progressive values when Israel enters the conversation. It is frequently anti-Zionist progressives who bend or break their own principles in the service of intolerance.

To see this clearly, let us examine how some progressives violate their own principles when the subject is Israel and the Jews.

1. “Impact matters more than intent” — except when Jews describe antisemitic impact

In antiracist and DEI discourse, a core idea is that harm can be real even if it was unintended. Derald Wing Sue’s influential work on microaggressions defines them as everyday indignities that may be “intentional or unintentional” but still communicate hostile or derogatory messages toward minority groups. But when Jews say that phrases like “globalize the intifada,” Holocaust inversions, “Zionists control X,” or social exclusion of “Zionists” have an antisemitic impact, the answer often becomes: You are misunderstanding our intent. Suddenly, intent is sovereign again.

For every other minority, impact reveals harm. For Jews, intent absolves it.

2. “Believe marginalized people about their own experience” — except Jews on antisemitism

Progressive discourse often insists that outsiders should not be the final judges of a minority’s pain. But with Jews, the pattern is different: Jewish testimony is treated as special pleading, bad faith, hasbara, fragility, or an attempt to silence criticism.

David Hirsh calls this “The Livingstone Formulation,” after antisemitic former mayor of London Ken Livingstone: instead of engaging the substance of an antisemitism claim, the respondent accuses the Jew of making the claim dishonestly to suppress criticism of Israel. So the accusation is flipped. Thus, the Jew who names antisemitism is not heard as a witness, but prosecuted as a censor.

There’s even a deeper violation here. Progressives usually say that affected communities should have a major voice in defining the harm done to them. But when Jews define certain rhetoric, exclusions, or conspiracy tropes as antisemitic, they are often told that they are exaggerating, weaponizing trauma, or acting in bad faith. Jews are invited to testify about antisemitism only after agreeing not to define it.

This is not merely theoretical. In New York City, where antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in recent years, political leaders who refuse to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism — or any serious working definition — are effectively claiming the authority to fight a phenomenon they decline to define. Worse, they are saying that they, and not Jews, will decide what counts as antisemitism. Progressives would not accept that arrangement for any other minority.

3. “Do not hold minorities collectively responsible” — except Jews

After 9/11, progressives rightly argued that Muslims should not be forced to apologize for terrorism. Asian Americans should not answer for China. Russians abroad should not answer for Putin. Palestinians should not be reduced to Hamas.

But Jews on campuses, in cultural institutions, and in progressive spaces are often treated as morally suspect. This is not only politically ugly; it is bigoted.

While progressives usually reject the demand that Muslims condemn terrorism every time there is an attack, Jews are often expected to denounce Israel before being allowed into moral conversation.

In other words, the collective-blame taboo is universal — until the collective is Jewish. Litmus tests are abhorrent, but they are demanded of Jews as a matter of course.

Broadly speaking, it is anathema for progressives to demand that minorities renounce to parts of themselves as the price of admission. They coined the term “bring your full self” to the public space. But Jews are often asked to pass a test: Are you a “good Jew” who repudiates Zionism, or a suspect Jew who must be monitored? The price of admission to some progressive spaces is that Jews amputate the part of their identity that connects them to Jewish peoplehood.

4. “Power does not erase vulnerability” — except Jewish vulnerability

Progressives usually understand that a group can be socially or economically successful and still be vulnerable. Asians can be called “model minorities” and still face racism. Gay people can be affluent and still face homophobia. Women can hold power and still face misogyny.

But Jews are often placed in the category of “power” so completely that Jewish fear becomes illegitimate. This is where crude oppressor/oppressed binaries meet antisemitism. They both imagine Jews as all-powerful, conspiratorial, manipulative, wealthy, or secretly controlling things.

Antisemitism is the only form of racism that disguises itself as anti-power.

5. “National self-determination matters” — except Jewish self-determination

International law and progressive politics both recognize that peoples have a right to collective self-determination. Article 1 of the major human-rights covenants begins with the principle that “all peoples have the right of self-determination.” Indigenous rights frameworks also emphasize collective self-determination; UNDRIP Article 3 states that Indigenous peoples have the right to determine their political status and pursue their development.

But Jewish peoplehood is often recoded as merely religious. If Jews are only a religion, then Zionism can be dismissed as a bizarre demand for a “religious state.” But Jews are also an indigenous people, a civilization, a language-bearing, memory-bearing, land-linked collective. One can argue about borders, settlements, occupation, Palestinian rights, or the character of the Israeli state. But denying that Jews have any legitimate collective claim at all is not ordinary criticism.

The Jewish people are treated as too ancient to be modern and too successful to be indigenous.

There is something even more pernicious at play here. For progressives, Identity is complex and self-defined, except for Jewish identity

People are generally allowed to describe themselves as a people, a culture, a religion, a civilization, a nation, or some mixture of these. Jews, however, are often flattened into “just a religion,” because that makes Jewish peoplehood and Zionism easier to dismiss.

The same culture that celebrates fluid, layered identity demands that Jews become only a denomination.

6. “Context matters” — except Jewish historical context

Progressive analysis is usually contextual. It asks: What is the history? What trauma does this symbol evoke? What power does this word carry? What past violence does this rhetoric summon?

But when Jewish history enters the picture, context is often flattened. Calls to boycott “Zionists” willfully ignore the historical echoes such boycotts carry for Jews. Comparisons between Israelis and Nazis are not only cruel and false; they also violate a key progressive tenet. An ideology exquisitely sensitive to traumatic symbols in every other case becomes strangely careless with Jewish trauma.

Progressives are usually serious about the way past violence shapes present vulnerability. But Jewish trauma is frequently treated as manipulation. The Holocaust, exile, pogroms, and antisemitism are cast as excuses rather than wounds.

Every people is allowed a memory, except Jews, whose memory is treated as propaganda.

7. “Don’t tokenize minorities” — except anti-Zionist Jews

Progressive spaces are usually alert to tokenism. One Black person does not speak for all Black people; one Muslim does not invalidate Islamophobia; one woman does not erase misogyny.

But a small number of anti-Zionist Jews are often used as moral absolution: See, Jews agree with us.

The Jewish dissenter is not treated as one voice among many, but as a permission slip.

8. Beware essentialism — except Zionists

Progressive language usually warns against reducing people to one identity. But “Zionist” is often used not as a political description but as a totalizing moral category: corrupt, colonial, racist, dangerous, beyond conversation. Since most Jews have some connection to Israel, this often becomes a way of condemning Jews without saying “Jews.”

‘Zionist’ becomes the word that lets people essentialize Jews while congratulating themselves for avoiding the word Jew.”

This correlates with another violation of the progressive doctrine: dehumanization. Progressive politics usually insists that even guilty people must not be stripped of their humanity. But Israelis are often spoken of as settlers, colonizers, soldiers, occupiers, Zionists — rarely as children, parents, leftists, refugees, Mizrahim, Holocaust descendants, peace activists, hostages, or ordinary human beings.

Boycotts are not only a mechanism of exclusion. At their worst, they become a statement that there is no human being in front of me who deserves to be seen as a person.

9. “Safety matters” — except Jewish safety

Safe spaces, emotional harm, exclusionary speech, and hostile climates are key concepts in the progressive worldview. But when Jews say that certain chants, imagery, academic boycotts, or social litmus tests make Jews unsafe, they are told they are confusing discomfort with danger.

For any other minority, safety is subjective. It’s they who define what harms them. But when Jews say they feel unsafe, then it becomes a courtroom standard.

10 – “Believe women, believe survivors,” – except Jewish ones.

There’s a hitherto unbreakable progressive principle: Survivors of sexual violence should not be met first with suspicion, forensic nitpicking, or ideological dismissal. But after October 7^th, Israeli Jewish women were treated as if their testimony, their bodies, and even corroborating evidence had to overcome a political presumption of bad faith.

For every other victim, disbelief is rape culture. For Israeli Jewish women, disbelief became political sophistication.

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Like Benda, I’m not asking progressives to abandon their principles – whether I agree with them or not would be a different conversation – I demand that they apply them consistently, without an asterisk that says “except for Jews.”

Again, the unacceptable thing is not that progressives criticize Israel. Israel is a state, and states should be criticized. What’s unacceptable is that, when Jews or Israel enter the conversation, many of the progressive world’s most cherished moral rules suddenly become negotiable.

Speech is usually judged by impact, not intent — until Jews say that certain slogans, analogies, or exclusions make them feel unsafe. Then intent becomes everything: “That’s not what we meant.” Lived experience is usually treated as morally serious — until Jews describe antisemitism, at which point they are told they are misreading (or weaponizing) their own oppression. Collective blame is usually condemned — unless Jews are made to answer for Israel. National self-determination is usually honored — unless the nation in question is the Jewish people.

Antisemitism is always suicidal. When antisemitism hijacks the human-rights ecosystem, it does not harm only Jews. It destroys the credibility of the institutions and movements that allow it to enter. As a result, victims of abuse around the world are left with fewer credible advocates. Paradoxically, this also harms Palestinians, because the demonization of Israel and Zionism makes it easier for many people to dismiss real instances of Israeli abuse.

That may be the worst consequence of progressive inconsistency: it not only harms Jews. It discredits progressive values themselves. The next time progressives speak about sexual violence, their denial or minimization of Hamas’s sexual violence will be used against them. The next time they call attention to the vulnerability of minorities, their indifference to Jewish vulnerability will weaken the claim. The next time they accuse others of racism, their own hypocrisy will be used to dismiss the charge.

Of course, plenty of Jews also suspend their principles when it comes to Palestinians. To say that Jews have the right to self-determination and Palestinians do not is the same inconsistency I am critiquing here. But two wrongs do not make a right. Progressives cannot use the inconsistency of some Jews as a license to exclude Jews from universal principles. That, too, violates the very values they claim to uphold.

Here’s the reality that we need to see: a principle that disappears when Jews need it was never a principle. It was a permission structure for bigotry.

“Progressive” antizionists and far right Israelis argue for a single state “from the river to the sea.” For liberal minded people, the far right’s rationale – and the particulars of their project – are easy to dismiss. But some pieces of the “progressive” argument, especially those of people like Peter Beinart, sounds and feel fair to the untrained eye. It’s important to explain why they are anything but.

The most seductive argument of the progressive one-staters is also the most misleading: They say there should be a single state with “one person, one vote”; equal rights for all; no ethnic privilege; no walls, no checkpoints, no hierarchy. Put that way, the proposal sounds not only reasonable but morally irresistible. Who, after all, could be against equal rights?

The problem is that the argument deliberately obscures the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. That conflict is not only a conflict among individuals seeking civil equality. It’s not even a conflict between racial or ethnic groups; It is, mostly, a conflict between two peoples seeking national self-determination. And civil rights, indispensable as they are, do not exhaust the meaning of political freedom.

A Palestinian who can vote in a single state but is denied Palestinian national independence has not received Palestinian self-determination. A Jew who can vote in that same state but whose collective national home has been dissolved has not received Jewish self-determination. Both may be equal as citizens, but both have been dispossessed as peoples. And this is key because this conflict is not, at its core, a conflict over civic rights but over national rights. Western pseudo-progressive advocates, like Peter Beinart, redefine a conflict between two indigenous national groups to fit their preferred categories of “civil rights,” inherited, perhaps, from the American context of the 1960s. In other words, they speak beautifully about individual rights while brazenly removing the collective right that both Palestinians and Jews have claimed for more than a century: the right to be authors, not merely residents, of their national political futures.

To beef up their argument, these pseudo-progressives point to the few exceptions in which multinational states work (they generally use Switzerland and Belgium to “prove” that you can have prosperous and peaceful multinational states), but they ignore that the overwhelming majority of multinational experiences ended in literal bloodbaths. They neglect to say that multinational states can work only under very rare conditions: long-standing institutional habit, accepted borders, mutual vetoes, a long record of peaceful coexistence, low levels of existential fear, and a shared commitment to the state itself. None of those conditions exists between Israelis and Palestinians today. Walloons and Flemish never fought a war, let alone murder each other with suicide bombings.

Beinart also points out to the South African example. He claims that since the one-person-one-vote regime has been established, there haven’t been any major outbursts of sectarian violence in the country. While it’s true that South Africa hasn’t dissolved into permanent civil war, Beinart’s characterization is false. Equal citizenship did not abolish communal violence, racialized fear, xenophobic scapegoating, or political factionalism. Since 1994, South Africa has experienced national violence in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), repeated xenophobic riots, and racialized violence. In KZN alone, 500,000 people have been displaced and thousands killed.

But even if Beinart wouldn’t be using misleading data points about South Africa, he’s deliberately mixing categories. South Africa’s central constitutional conflict was racial — the struggle to end white supremacy and establish a “one person, one vote” system — not a conflict between two national peoples each seeking sovereign self-determination in the same territory. In KZN, the democratic settlement did not automatically quell a different kind of conflict that was ethno-regional and national. In fact, it might have accentuated it. Analyzing Israel/Palestine through the lens of South Africa is a deliberate muddying of categories, akin to measuring distances in kilograms.

Antizionists seem to believe that, magically, a Palestinian majority country with power over a Jewish minority will be the unicorn – the only Arab-majority democratic country that respects minority rights. To that undeniable flaw in his reasoning, Peter Beinart would give two answers. One, it is that Palestinians only resort to violence because they are denied rights. Give them rights, the argument goes, and they’ll lose any incentive to violence. The second is that Middle Eastern countries are not good examples, because they are dictatorships, and the new binational state would (I guess, magically) be a democracy. In fact, both are false. No. democracy doesn’t prevent nationalist violence. In Northern Ireland, individuals had full civic rights in a democracy, and the IRA still resorted to violence. ETA did the same, even though the Basques in Spain have full civil rights in a democratic Spain. This is, of course, without mentioning the most radical examples, like Yugoslavia, in which the transition to democracy coincided with the biggest bloodbath in European soil since WW2.

At the core of this constellation of fallacies lies a gross misunderstanding, if not willful ignorance. The one-state argument is not more committed to human rights; rather, it misunderstands the architecture of human rights. Human rights were never simply a free-floating individualism above nations. They developed through citizenship, national rights, self-determination, and the protection of minorities. They emerged from the fight for minorities’ national rights in the twilight of the European Central Empires, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian.

In “The Nationalism of Human Rights,” Loeffler writes that modern human rights “arrived tethered to the nation-state,” and that people may deserve rights as human beings, but historically they received them as citizens of a particular political community. The rights tradition encompassed both individual and collective rights, and individual emancipation went hand in hand with collective national emancipation.

If Loeffler is not enough of an authority for you, take it from Hannah Arendt: “The restoration of human rights has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.” Even Franz Fanon talked about national consciousness as the key to personal emancipation. There is nothing progressive about abolishing national self-determination, and the classical left often understood this better than today’s Western pseudo-progressives.

So don’t be fooled: Beinart et al don’t propose “full rights” for Israelis and Palestinians; they demand that both abandon some rights to, hopefully, receive others. Or to put it differently, they, in their infinite moral wisdom, decide for the natives that their national rights can be sacrificed to establish a “solution” they consider fair. They are like parents of two children who fight for a chocolate and say, “Well, if you can’t split the chocolate, none of you will have it.” Only that here, it is not a piece of chocolate that Beinart denies Israelis and Palestinians, but one of their most basic human rights.

We mentioned above the colonialist nature of this attitude. For starters, Western Progressives put themselves in the position of moral arbiters. Like Sykes and Picot in 1918, they know better than the indigenous peoples what’s the best solution to their plight. That most Israelis and Palestinians reject the idea of a single state with equal rights leaves them unfazed. After all, they imply, the natives are morally inferior and can’t be trusted to determine what’s good for them. As the French, Belgians, and Brits decided that people and tribes with different religious, ethnic, and national identities should be forced together into a single state, the pseudo-progressive antizionists dictate from the air-conditioned halls of Columbia University that Palestinians and Israelis should be forced into a single state, against their will. The 20th century offers enough examples of what happens when outside powers force antagonistic peoples into artificial political containers and then congratulate themselves on their cartographic elegance. Given that record, we should expect Bosnia and Rwanda instead of Switzerland or Belgium.

Peter Beinart is a smart man. What I exposed in the lines above is well known and virtually self-evident. Anybody who knows history – and Beinart does – knows that full human rights can’t exist without national rights. The fact that attempts to force the creation of binational states end in monumental bloodshed is not precisely an arcane piece of information, but something we see every day in the Middle East. And that is, of course, without even considering the impact of October 7^th on the naïve notion that Israelis and Palestinians can share a state in peace after that.

The question is then why does he espouse a vision that is at best false and at worst, reckless about the potential to produce massive violence? Ignorance is not the answer in this case. For some antizionists, the answer is simple: they are antisemitic and/or evil. They know that a binational state means, sooner or later, a genocide of Jews, and that’s why they support it. But Peter Beinart isn’t evil, but, as I could experience myself, kind and generous. And he’s not naïve either. So what is it?

I venture this hypothesis. Beinart is not advancing these ideas for Israel/Palestine as true templates for the solution of the conflict. He’s smart enough to know that Israelis will not agree to national suicide – and Palestinians won’t either. This may explain why he doesn’t devote any serious thought to the practical architecture of the one-state vision. He knows it won’t happen, and that’s why he seems unconcerned about the prospect of a bloodbath. His real audience is not Israeli or Palestinian (he famously boycotts Israelis and only speaks to a very small number of non-representative Palestinian activists). His audience is American Jewish. Beinart is not trying to solve the Middle East conflict; he is trying to redesign American Judaism. His project is not a diplomatic plan but an identity project — an attempt to create a Judaism for which Israel is irrelevant, or perhaps no longer morally admissible. That’s why he doesn’t care that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians reject his idyllic vision of a binational state. In this vision, Palestinians become the vehicle through which Western Jews can dramatize moral courage and feel they belong in the camp of justice. The problem is that these views are neither just nor fair and show moral cowardice rather than bravery. They are colonial for they dispossess both Israelis and Palestinians of political agency, and they could result in a real genocide, not the imagined one of today.

What’s most contemptible in this attitude is its underlying dehumanization. Israelis and Palestinians are not props in a morality play for the privileged, but real human beings, and what’s more, collective political actors. They are not metaphors, not placeholders in someone else’s ideological diagram, not interchangeable victims and villains in a drama staged from afar. They are peoples with memories, fears, languages, dead, children, collective hopes, traumas, and claims.

A just peace will not come from asking either people to disappear into someone else’s universalism, or from demanding that they submit to spurious ideas of fairness concocted in Western ivory towers. It will not come from telling Palestinians that their national aspirations are merely a subset of civil rights, or telling Jews that their longing for self-determination was a mistake history should now correct. Equal rights are indispensable. But equality that denies nationhood is not equality but oppression.

The task is harder, less elegant, and less satisfying than the slogans allow: to secure the full dignity of both peoples, as individuals and as nations. Anything less is not liberation but colonial condescension.

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Last month, Pope Leo XIV issued the encyclical Magnificas Humanitas, dedicated exclusively to artificial intelligence.

I’m sure that, given the length of the document (43,000 words), most believers gave it to AI to summarize, but that contradiction aside, I have to admit that I felt a pinch of jealousy about the Vatican’s determination to develop a theology for the age of AI In that respect, the Catholic Church seem to be ahead of us, Jews.

Somebody can counter that with the following argument: Christians and Jews have different approaches to theology. Christianity has often begun with theology and proceeded to practice; Judaism has generally begun with practice and only then reflected on its meaning. As Leo Baeck observed, “For Christianity, doctrine comes first; for Judaism, the commandment.” In other words, Jews will deal with issues related to A.I. through the prism of Halacha (Jewish Law). What is allowed and what is forbidden? What are “kosher” uses of AI? Can I count a bot for a minyan?

There are, I believe, two problems with that claim. One is that it’s not universal. Yes, Jews tended to focus more on praxis than on doctrine, but at key moments in our history, when confronted with massive civilizational changes, the development of theological thought proved critical to keeping Judaism relevant and vibrant. Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, the Kabbalah, Hasidism, and the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) are examples of theological thought that sought to respond to major shifts in the zeitgeist. The second problem is that Halacha, while grounded in legal reasoning, rests on implicit theological, anthropological, and philosophical assumptions. It is, for example, forbidden to murder another human because of a theological premise: humans are created in the image of God and therefore imbued with an unassailable dignity that makes human life sacred. In other words, at the foundation of The Law are ideas about the nature of God and Man. Furthermore, Halacha relies on precedent. When a new technology appears, say, electricity, Halacha will look for an analogy. Electricity, rabbis say, is, in some way, like fire, so we’ll apply to the former the rules that regulate the latter: Because you can light a fire on Shabbat, you can’t initiate an electric mechanism on the holy day. But as technology advances, the precedents become less and less relevant. We already push the analogy when we say electricity is like fire, but we know it really isn’t. Now, imagine finding a precedent for something like A.I. in a 3,000-year-old book?

Imagine being in a submarine but not knowing it: If a crew member asked whether he could open the hatch above your heads, you’d have no good reason to say no. Obviously, you must first establish that you’re in a submarine before you even discuss opening the hatch. Just as the framing — boat or submarine? — guides the response of the captain. Similarly, the theological and metaphysical framing within which Judaism operates conditions the halakhic response.

The halakhic method has worked so far because its theological and anthropological foundations have proved equal to the changes we have dealt with. It has given us a legal and ethical system that has remained relevant for millennia. But A.I. is one of the moments in history in which the basic assumptions are being questioned. What is humanity? What is intelligence? What is wisdom? What is judgment? And what is God in the era of omniscient algorithms?

The Catholic Church looked at AI and concluded that the issue was important enough to warrant a 43,000-word encyclical. It treated AI as a theological question before a technical one. It asked what kind of creature a human being is, what truth means, and what work means.

The truth is that reading the entire long document is not that important. The value of Magnificas Humanitas lies not so much in its content as in the fact that it frames A.I. as fundamentally a theological/anthropological question. In this case, the framing of the question is more important than the answer. In stressing the question over the answer, the pontiff was being surprisingly Jewish.

The Jewish Paradox of this technological moment.

Throughout history, Jews applied legal and ethical frameworks to technologies developed by others. Until the 20^th century, Jews were, at best, marginal players in the technological game. Even then, Jews played an outsized role in science, but not necessarily in technology. Jews were never Luddites; we used technology, and we asked halachic and ethical questions about it, but we didn’t shape the direction or the nature of technological development.

Now, however, things are different. Jews are – as individuals – at the forefront of the AI industry. Israel has one of the most vibrant innovation ecosystems in the world and leads in many new technologies. Jews are not the only players in the AI revolution, and perhaps not the most important ones, but they are, unprecedentedly, in a position to shape how this new technology develops. It looks as if for the first time, the roles are reversing. If in the past, non-Jews created technologies and Jews thought about them, now Jews create technologies and the Pope reflects on them.

This may be a tad hyperbolic; after all, several leading thinkers on the philosophy of technology are (or were) Jewish, notably Hans Jonas, who coined the concept of the “imperative of responsibility” as an ethical response to the threats posed by technology. He and others, like Gunther Anders, worried that technological power was outrunning moral wisdom. Joseph Weizenbaum is perhaps the most relevant. After creating ELIZA, the earliest chatbot, he became one of AI’s fiercest critics and argued that some decisions should never be delegated to computers.

But while Jonas draws on some biblical grounding, his response is philosophical rather than theological. His aim is not to develop a Jewish theological or anthropological framework for AI.

By and large, while Catholicism has begun articulating a comprehensive theological response to AI, the Jewish world has largely confined itself to questions of use, policy, and regulation.

We are discussing AI use on Shabbat; we are holding sessions on nonprofit applications; we are hosting panels on fundraising and automation; and we are discussing how AI can help us fight antisemitism and bigotry. All those are important questions, but we aren’t asking enough about what artificial intelligence reveals about the human person.

In other words, the problem is not that we lack answers, but that we have barely begun asking the central question.

In many respects, the papal encyclical “sounds Jewish” because it echoes concepts shared by both religions. It points out that the danger of AI is not only economic displacement but the reduction of people to data, performance, and optimization. Using imagery from the Hebrew Bible, it warns against a new “Tower of Babel” built on technological power divorced from transcendence. Pope Leo shares concerns that have been historically Jewish: concentrated technological power, the intensification of inequality, the weakening of democracy, and the creation of new forms of domination. Above all, the document insists that machines cannot be moral agents and that responsibility must never be delegated to algorithms. The very name of the encyclical (The Splendor of Human Dignity) says what the main argument is – human dignity must remain the guiding star of technological development. No Jewish theologian can find fault in those arguments.

So, if a Jewish theology of AI entered into a dialogue with the Catholic one, what could it add to the conversation?

I wouldn’t want to prejudge the result of that theological exploration, but here’s a first thought: The Catholic response seems to approach the human person through ontology – it asks “what is Man.” Judaism asks that question too, but only as a prerequisite for another dimension, that of covenant: What is demanded of Man? Judaism’s most distinctive contribution may not be a theory of intelligence, or an ontology of Man, but a theory of covenant, responsibility, and obligation.

The Vatican’s intervention matters not because it sets doctrine for the Catholic Church. It matters because it demonstrates that AI is fundamentally a question about anthropology. Judaism possesses one of the richest anthropologies ever developed – the anthropology of covenant.

It behooves our community to invest in deep philosophical thinking about this issue. For example, “Theology for AI" should be a mandatory course for rabbinical students of all denominations. We need to create (and fund) settings where thinkers and industry leaders can discuss these issues, and we need to support emerging initiatives that address these questions not only instrumentally, but anthropologically and theologically.

A civilization built around covenant, obligation, interpretation, memory, and human dignity should have something distinctive to say about machines that increasingly perform tasks once considered uniquely human. In fact, I’m sure it does. The question is, what are we waiting to say it?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Gulag had become too embarrassing for the Soviet regime. Some people were still deported to Siberia well into the 1980s, but by and large, the Stalinist camps were replaced by a more discreet, and in some ways equally terrifying, practice: putting dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.

The logic of this policy was chillingly elegant from the regime’s perspective: if socialism represented the scientifically inevitable culmination of history, then persistent opposition to it could be framed not as legitimate political disagreement, but as evidence of mental pathology. If you cannot see that you are living in a workers’ paradise, you are not just wrong; you must be mentally ill.

There was, in fact, a formal diagnosis for it: vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya, “sluggish schizophrenia,” associated with the psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky, the Serbsky Institute, and the Moscow school of psychiatry. The diagnosis was elastic enough to cover almost any criticism of the regime.

The Soviets were not unique. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, opponents of women’s rights and women’s suffrage often treated those demands as symptoms of “hysteria,” a term rooted in the Greek hystera, meaning uterus. Women’s demands were reframed as biological or psychological malfunctions. That, conveniently, allowed shifting the question from “Should women have equal rights?” to “What kind of disturbed woman would demand them?”

In some cases, the psychiatrization of dissent had catastrophic consequences. Winston Churchill was routinely described as unstable and obsessive when, in the 1930s, he warned of the danger Hitler represented. Dismissing his warnings as pathological helped Britain remain dangerously underprepared for the Nazi onslaught.

We obviously condemn people like Snezhnevsky. But are we so different?

Maybe in degree. Not always in essence.

If you use the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” you are pathologizing dissent just like the Soviets. If, on the other side, you refer to Trump supporters as “cultic” or enthralled by “mass psychosis,” you’d be at home in the Serbsky Institute. In both cases, political argument is replaced by amateur diagnosis. And policies or habits of mind that emerge from that mode of conversation tend to be tragic.

The “derangement” language was first popularized by Charles Krauthammer in a 2003 column. He defined “Bush Derangement Syndrome” as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”

Krauthammer was pointing to a real problem. The conversations about Iraq and Afghanistan were emotionally charged, morally inflated, and often full of excessive language. Bush was sometimes dismissed as an idiotic pawn of Dick Cheney and a neocon cabal rather than argued with. As Thomas Friedman warned at the time, “some things are true even if George W. Bush believes them.”

But here is the catch: many of the supposedly deranged were not deranged at all. Many of their predictions about the futility of the “forever wars” were substantially correct. Now, twenty-five years later, almost everyone claims to have been against them. Had the country listened to the war critics instead of pathologizing them, we might have saved thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Perhaps the Middle East would look very different. (This is, of course, self-critical. I was fully in favor of the Iraq War and too often dismissed or disqualified its critics.)

In the Trump era, however, the medicalization of dissent has reached a fever pitch — no pun intended — both in the media and in ordinary conversations among friends and colleagues. Bush, to his credit, never embraced the term or waved away criticism as derangement. When asked about Krauthammer’s phrase, he refused to legitimize it. Instead, he said, “Look, I’ve been a little disappointed at times. But I understand why people object to decisions I made.” Today, by contrast, “TDS” is often used to disqualify almost any criticism of Trump. Meanwhile, opponents often dismiss his supporters as cultic, brainwashed, or trapped in some collective psychosis.

As in Krauthammer’s time, there is some basis for the claims. Some criticism of Trump is indeed shrill. It often seems to presume that he can do nothing right and that even positive developments under his watch must be illegitimate. On the other hand, many of his defenders are willing to ignore or excuse his obvious flaws — or worse, to explain his erratic behavior as evidence of a hidden genius mere mortals cannot understand.

So what is more “deranged”: to obsess over the dangers Trump represents, or to ignore them?

One could argue that there is something particularly pernicious about accusations of “Derangement Syndrome” as used today. The problem is not only that they are insulting. It is that they collapse several distinctions that democratic societies need to preserve. They blur the line between irrational obsession and intense, justified moral concern; between opinion and fact; between alarmism and vigilance. Once criticism is pre-labeled “derangement,” the content of said criticism no longer needs to be addressed.

The accusation is also unusually totalizing. Normal political rhetoric says, “You are wrong.” “Derangement syndrome,” says: “your entire cognitive apparatus has faulty.”

That move is especially corrosive in a democracy because democratic legitimacy rests on the assumption that opponents remain rational, moral agents who participate in a shared public space. Once disagreement becomes evidence of pathology, opponents cease to be interlocutors and become cases.

The accusation of derangement, as used today, is dangerous in several additional ways.

First, it is a claim to emotional monopoly.

The accusation is not merely, “You are irrational.” It implicitly claims that only one emotional register is legitimate. It delegitimizes not just the argument, but the scale of the emotional response itself. It implies that if your comment reflects fear, alarm, or outrage, it is illegitimate before it is even examined.

It also creates a self-sealing logic. Any unusually strong reaction can itself be cited as proof of derangement — even if events later vindicate the concern. The more alarmed someone becomes, the more the accusation appears confirmed. In that sense, the phrase immunizes its target from scrutiny because it makes the alarm itself suspicious.

That is a problem because many political phenomena should provoke strong reactions. Democracy depends on our ability to distinguish between what deserves true outrage and what belongs to the ordinary rough-and-tumble of political life. If every alarm is dismissed as hysteria, societies lose the capacity for calibrated vigilance.

Moreover, history shows that emotional excess and factual accuracy are not mutually exclusive. As the Churchill case suggests, some of the people most correct about political dangers sounded shrill, obsessive, or extreme before events proved them right.

Second, it reflects the therapeutic colonization of politics.

Modern societies increasingly interpret human behavior through psychological categories. The language of trauma, triggers, pathology, wellness, narcissism, toxicity, and mental health has migrated from therapy into politics. Accusations of “derangement” by one side, and “mass psychosis” by the other, belong to that larger transformation.

The deeper problem is that therapeutic language is designed for care, not for truth-seeking. Clinical categories are useful in medicine because the goal is to heal the patient. But democratic politics is adversarial, moral, and conflictual.

Once therapeutic language enters politics, things get muddied. Conviction becomes obsession. Moral passion becomes instability. Disagreement becomes dysregulation.

The therapeutic colonization of politics is also making traditional civic language seem outdated, even laughable. We talk about trauma, derangement, and psychosis, but less about virtue, judgment, prudence, character, and statesmanship. In a vicious cycle, the more we rely on psychological language, the more we degrade civic and political language.

Third, “derangement syndrome” is anti-political language.

Politics presumes that citizens may rationally disagree about genuinely difficult matters. Democracy requires winning and losing arguments without concluding that the other side is insane.

But “derangement syndrome” implies that no reasonable person could reach this conclusion through ordinary political judgment. In that sense, it is anti-political language. It transforms opponents from fellow citizens into cognitive abnormalities. And that is devastating, because democracy depends less on agreement than on the willingness to treat disagreement as legitimate.

Fourth, there is the paradox of excessive normality.

Sometimes the people accused of “derangement” are reacting to the erosion of norms that others have already normalized. Churchill sounded deranged because much of Europe had normalized Hitler’s behavior and treated him as just another politician with whom one could do business.

It is not that Chamberlain and others were evil. They were acting on a very human trait: adaptation. As a survival mechanism, the mind creates new baselines. When something bad happens and persists over time, the brain often stops treating it as an exception and begins to treat it as the “new normal.”

Added to that, societies also tend to reward those who appear unshockable, emotionally detached, above hysteria.

Accusations of “derangement syndrome” flatter the accuser as sober and balanced. But history suggests that civilizations are endangered not only by panic, but by people who become desensitized to danger.

*

In sum, the pathologization of political discourse, especially of dissent, destroys a society’s epistemic shock absorbers. Every complex society needs people who overreact, obsess, distrust consensus, or sound unreasonable at first. Those people are often wrong. But historically, they are also disproportionately the ones who detect real dangers early.

If Soviet authorities had considered what dissidents were saying instead of putting them in psychiatric hospitals, perhaps they might have enacted the reforms needed to save the Soviet system from its structural flaws.

A society that pathologizes dissent, therefore, creates a dangerous selection effect: it rewards emotional conformity over cognitive risk-taking.

Of course, not every intense critic is right. And deranged people do exist. Not every person dressed in rags and shouting at the powerful is Jeremiah. A permanent state of moral panic is not functional politics either. That is why healthy societies need mechanisms for distinguishing false alarms from true alarms.

But when dissent is medicalized, alarms are dismissed before they are even evaluated. It’s akin to a pilot who automatically dismisses a glaring red light on the dashboard as an alarm malfunction, not as an underlying problem that can crash the plane.

Jews should be particularly concerned with this semantic drift because, often in our history, we were pathologized, too. Medieval anti-Judaism described Jews as spiritually diseased or morally corrupted. Racial antisemitism medicalized Jewishness itself as a social contagion. Totalitarian movements often portrayed Jewish dissent as neurotic, parasitic, cosmopolitan, or degenerative.

This continues in different forms today. Lara Sheehi, who presided over the American Psychological Association’s Division 39, was accused of teaching that Zionism is a mental illness or “settler psychosis.” The APA has rejected that categorization, but the episode is still revealing. The temptation to translate Jewish collective identity into clinical language has not disappeared.

This is relevant for us in another crucial way: we invented the prophet as the template of the alarmist, emotionally intense critic of the monarchy. That should give us pause before we rush to treat others as “deranged,” “cultic,” or “psychotic.”

Pathologizing dissent abolishes accountability on both sides. The person accused of derangement is no longer answerable for specific claims because his sanity has been found to be unsound. But the person making the accusation is also relieved of responsibility. He need not rebut, persuade, explain, or reconsider. He has performed a self-sealing diagnosis, and the case is closed.

This is how public argument dies: not in silence, but in contempt.

How do we come out of this vicious cycle of pathologization?

Before calling someone deranged, ask: What claim is being made? What evidence would confirm it? What evidence would disprove it? Is the tone excessive because the claim is false, or because the speaker believes the stakes are high? Am I reacting to the argument, or to the discomfort produced by hearing it?

And perhaps most importantly: what would I do if this warning turned out to be true? We use that thinking in most other aspects of our lives. We take fire insurance even when the risk of experiencing a fatal fire in the US is 1 in 40,000. If the warning of a “deranged” person has, say, a 10% chance of being true, shouldn’t we consider it seriously instead of dismissing it as deranged? Or do we call the insurance broker deranged?

Dissent is one of the necessary stress-tests of public life. It is society’s insurance policy against groupthink and the catastrophe that invariably follows.

If the language of “derangement” continues unchallenged, shared life will become impossible. Because if every faction has its own diagnosis for the other, no one will be right or wrong anymore. Everyone will be sick. And when everyone is sick, no one is responsible.

If you’ve been to Israel, you probably know of the bizarre fascination the country has with the old brand of instant coffee: “Elite.” The coffee tastes pretty much like a liquified umbrella with notes of desert dust and an aftertaste of molten lava, and yet, people love it.

The reasons for that aberration of taste are not something science can elucidate; thus, I want to focus not on the coffee itself, but on its name. Because, in a time when the term “elite” has become a slur, it reminds us that, not long ago, it had a positive connotation.

The word’s positivity is evident in its etymology. It comes from the French élite, meaning “the elect” or “the chosen,” and it meant those selected for excellence, leadership, or distinction. In ancient Rome, those people were called “the optimates,” the best ones. This, in turn, derives from the Greek concept aristoi, the “best men,” that, according to Plato, had the virtue, skill, and wisdom to govern.

In modern political sociology, thinkers like Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels did not imagine a world without elites; they argued that every complex society produces ruling minorities, whether acknowledged or not. The point is that it’s impossible to run a society – especially an advanced one – without a class of people with the skills and personal qualities to do so.

To be sure, these thinkers were not authoritarian – they believed in democracy (in the case of the Greeks, they invented it), but they understood that through democratic mechanisms, elites are empowered to exercise influence in society. The US founding fathers (an elitist bunch if there ever was one) shared that view – fearing “the rule of the mob,” they empowered certain elites to exercise a level of power disproportionate to their popular representativity. The US Senate and the electoral college are a product of that ethos.

But today, the word has become an automatic disqualification. Today’s elite-hatred has unique features, but it’s not a new phenomenon. The Roman Republic was brought down by a rebellion against the optimates presented as an “anti-elite” movement. As today, those challenging the optimate elite called themselves “populares,” as though they represented “the people,” but nothing was further from the truth – they were just another faction of the wealthy Roman aristocracy that sought, above all, more power and fewer restrictions on its exercise. Indeed, when the populares emerged victorious from a series of civil wars, they abolished the Republic and, in the figure of the emperor, concentrated infinitely more power than the optimates ever had.

In contemporary discourse, “elites” are uniquely vilified. The contempt for elites is perhaps connected with modern-democratic disdain for hierarchies, but in the 20^th century, both the right and left piled blows on the concept. The right did it through resentment against “cosmopolitan,” bureaucratic, or intellectual elites; and the left, through suspicion of bourgeois authority, economic wealth, and class power. Meritocracy complicated everything further: while it delegitimized aristocracy and democratized power, it created a new credentialed class convinced that its privileges were deserved. Michael Young coined meritocracy as a warning, not a compliment.

To be sure, those critics aren’t without merit. The left-wing anti-elite rhetoric often comes from a real and sometimes justified critique: economic elites capture institutions; experts mask power as neutrality; corporate leaders determine policy without democratic accountability. On the right, anti-elite rhetoric tends to target biased media, turf-protecting bureaucracies, and dogmatic cultural arbiters that often disdain ordinary people.

But both sides go past legitimate critique and converge on the populist temptation. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser define populism around a moralized opposition between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and Jan-Werner Müller argues that populists do not merely criticize elites; they claim that they alone represent the real people

But like in ancient Rome, what passes today as a rebellion of “the people” against elites is, always, a struggle among elites themselves. The protagonists of these revolts are rarely the dispossessed; they are ambitious actors who possess resources—wealth, visibility, organizational capacity—but chafe at the constraints imposed by other elites: institutions, experts, norms, and procedures. They translate a conflict over power into a moral drama between “the people” and “the elite.” Once that translation succeeds, dismantling checks and balances appears not as consolidation of power, but as liberation. The result is not the end of elites, but their purging—fewer rivals, fewer constraints, and far greater freedom to act without challenge.

The mechanism follows a known pattern: 1 – One elite lacks full control (it’s blocked by institutions, norms, laws, expertise or competing elites. 2 – The elite aspiring to full control then delegitimizes those constraints, often in moralizing language (it talks about “corrupt elites,” “deep state,” “out of touch experts,” etc.; 3 – it mobilizes popular resentment, generally, by speaking about real grievances but redirecting them towards those who limit their power. 4 – It dismantles mediating institutions – it weakens the courts, the media, professional bodies, and state bureaucracies; in sum, anybody who can impose standards and limit power; 5 – it consolidates power with fewer checks.

When people like Tucker Carlson, for example, refer to the media as “elite,” the moniker makes no real sense. Carlson holds much more power and influence than most major media outlets. What he’s trying to do is delegitimize those who can impose standards and fact-checks on his fabrications so that he’s unconstrained by truth. When RFK Jr. attacks the medical establishment, he does it not as a representative of ‘the people” but as part of an elite of food supplement sellers and media influencers who don’t want to be constrained by medical standards and expertise. In academia, people like Edward Said present themselves as brave underdogs fighting the powerful when, in fact, they dominate cultural institutions to the point of cultural hegemony.

One great advantage of the term elite in contemporary discourse is that it doesn’t need to be defined. People use it and let it hover, suggestive but imprecise; gesturing towards a shadowy adversary without specifying who belongs to it or why. Anybody whom I dislike, regardless of my own privileged status, can be called “elite” and thus my critique has the satisfying allure – and moral righteousness – of “punching up.” That allows for the bizarre spectacle of somebody like Elon Musk – the richest man on the planet, and probably in history – to cast himself as a warrior against some undefined elite. He’s not alone: in the “age of grievance,” politicians who have dominated their country’s politics for decades claim to be “fighting the elites.”

Conveniently, “elite” is left vague. Is it a matter of wealth? Education? Institutional position? Cultural influence? The answer shifts depending on the needs of the moment. Billionaires can be recast as champions of the people, while mid-level civil servants barely eking out a living become “elites.” Scientists are elites when they advise policy, but not when they confirm prior beliefs. The category expands and contracts, not according to any stable criteria, but according to rhetorical convenience. What appears to be a sociological term is, in practice, a moral accusation—one that avoids the burden of argument by replacing it with insinuation.

Jews and the dangers of anti-elitism

When people rail about “shadowy cabals,” Jews should get nervous. More often than not, people who talk about “elites” put a figurative kippah on them. Jews are often portrayed prominently as members of the despised elites, and that legitimizes and even moralizes antisemitism. When MAGA’s America First wing attacked “globalist elites” within the movement, they presented Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner. If the term “globalist” were an objective description, Elon Musk, who is globally connected, transnational, wealthy, and influential, should be the globalist poster child. Alas, he’s almost never described as a “globalist” by populist-nationalist movements aligned with him when Jews generally are.

When radical Left Wing intellectuals attack elites, they will invariably choose a Jewish-aligned example as the target of their ire, like AIPAC, playing on the idea of secret power-hungry financiers. Both Leftists and Rightists have a bizarre fixation with Paul Wolfowitz when they decry the “neocon elite.” And of course, Stalin’s infamous purge of “cosmopolitan elites” targeted Jews almost exclusively.

The other inconvenient truth is that elites are not necessarily bad for progress or, in general, for improving the lives of marginalized groups. Most social change has been enacted by some elite or other, not by popular mobilization. The American Revolution was a product of an economic and cultural elite, and so was the French. In the social progress realm, causes like children’s rights, ending slavery, and medical advances were promoted and championed by elites, in many cases against popular desires.

Jews, specifically, shouldn’t spit to the sky. The emancipation of Europe’s Jews was almost exclusively an elite phenomenon. In country after country, equal rights were not demanded by the majority, but advanced by a relatively small stratum of legislators, jurists, and intellectuals shaped by Enlightenment ideals. In revolutionary France, in Habsburg reforms, in Prussian decrees, and in the long debates of the British Parliament, emancipation was typically imposed by liberal elites against significant popular hostility.

For both Jews and Gentiles, manipulative and conspiratorial distrust of elites always ends in tragedy. Historians show that governments that muzzle or sideline elites invariably fail. The most obvious example is Hitler’s distrust of the Prussian military elite. From 1942 onward, he had become convinced that Wehrmacht generals – who had led him to impressive victories – were defeatists and conspiring against him, and, based on that distrust, he had assumed direct control of the military. When generals advised consolidating defensive lines and strategic withdrawals, Hitler overruled them. Stalin, on the contrary, after the disasters of 1941, suspended his customary distrust of military elites and let able generals like Giorgi Zhukov run the war. Military historians believe these divergent attitudes were key factors in the war’s outcome.

Valid Critiques of Elites

In our times, when the obvious needs to be stated, I must clarify that this is not an automatic or uncritical defense of every elite. Elites sometimes fall short, with catastrophic consequences. They generally fail when they betray the standards and principles that made them elite in the first place. If your elite status is given by your academic knowledge, you can’t engage in ideological dogmatism and pretend to keep your influence. If you acquired elite economic status through free market mechanisms, you can’t expect people to acquiesce when you engage in monopolistic or oligopolistic behavior.

Every complex society has been, is, and will be run by elites, and, as with every human endeavor, those elites are susceptible to error, abuse, and the full catalog of human foibles. So the question is not whether we will have elites, but whether those will be competent, responsible, bound by standards, and democratically legitimate. When elites are vaguely and indiscriminately attacked, the result is never “no elites”, or “power to the people” but the loss of standards, institutional trust and pluralism.

The solution is not to sacralize elites but to discern between legitimate criticism and populist manipulation. Here’s how we do that:

Legitimate critique of elites is always specific. It identifies particular institutions, specific decisions, failures, or abuses of power. It doesn’t rely on generic attacks but subjects elites to fact-based scrutiny. It asks, for example, whether financial elites distorted markets, whether media organizations failed in their standards, whether academic institutions became intellectually conformist, whether technocrats exceeded democratic legitimacy, or whether political classes insulated themselves from the consequences of their policies. Such criticism is indispensable in a free society.

But manipulative anti-elitism doesn’t seek to improve but to disqualify. It eschews specificity and thrives on vagueness. It rarely defines who “the elites” are or what precisely makes them elite; the category expands and contracts according to rhetorical convenience. Its purpose is not to clarify responsibility but to delegitimize entire domains of expertise, mediation, and institutional authority. The difference is the gulf between argument and insinuation, between accountability and resentment, between social improvement and self-interest masquerading as rightfulness.

Because we will always be run by elites, we need to learn that difference well. We have the double duty of keeping our elites accountable and honest, while being vigilant towards those who pretend to be anti-elite and simply want absolute power.

Sadly, we don’t get to choose between “elites” and “the people,” but only between competing elites.

Let’s choose wisely.

One hundred times more people use the I-5 Highway than the winding Pacific coastal road to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It’s understandable: it takes less than half the time. Yes, the coastal road offers some stunning scenery, like Big Sur, but it has poor cell reception and is inconvenient in many other ways.

If you are among the 400,000 drivers who take the I-5 every day, instead of among the far fewer who drive the coastal road, don’t feel bad. It’s simply that you, like all of us, live in the age of the Homo Highwayicus, the Highway Man, a version of human who always seeks the fastest route between two points. A human for whom the highway has become a metaphor for life itself.

In his unforgettable novel Immortality, Milan Kundera contrasts the path and the highway. A path, he writes, is a tribute to space: every stretch has meaning in itself. It invites you to stop, linger, discover, and expect the unexpected. A highway, by contrast, is nothing but a line between two points. Its meaning lies in its origin and its destination. The space between is devalued; it’s a mere obstacle to overcome as fast as possible. Kundera notes how paths and small winding roads are vanishing, flattened by highways. But his key, and devastating, insight is this: before paths disappeared from the landscape, they had already disappeared from the human soul.

What Kundera is trying to tell us is that in modernity, we lost the capacity to experience the “in between” as meaningful. We redesigned the world to be predictable rather than surprising, reliable rather than awe-inspiring, functional rather than beautiful, and efficient rather than enriching.

The modern person, says Kundera, “no longer saw his own life as a path, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.”

Kundera is not alone. Marcel Proust, writing presciently in 1927, more than 60 years before Kundera, understood modernity as an “age of haste,” an era in which speed becomes paramount and experience disintegrates into a rapid succession of moments. That creates one of the most familiar feelings of our time: the impossibility of quiet contemplation.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han pushes this idea further. In his book The Scent of Time, he claims that speed might once have been a means to an end, but now it is an end in itself. The act of accelerating is becoming more important than even the destination. Our age has eliminated ideals and visions of the future; it has devalued lofty long-term goals. We may be going fast, but we’re going nowhere. By making everything immediately present and instantly accessible, digital life abolishes distances even more than highways; it eliminates waiting, the intervals between events. Time without intervals is like a text without spaces between letters and words: virtually unreadable. When the “in between” disappears, life becomes a mere succession of events, an accumulation without structure. It ceases to be a narrative and becomes a list. Our identity, which is, in essence, a story, dissolves into a succession of moments. It is a self without duration, without sediment, and without memory.

The cultural critic Christine Rosen adds another angle. In The Extinction of Experience, she laments that, because of the permanent presence of our devices, what she calls “interstitial times” have disappeared: those transitional moments that once marbled our days, waiting in line, sitting in silence, walking about. We rejoice in the elimination of those wasteful “empty spaces,” but we don’t realize that they were the very conditions of experience. They allowed reflection, anticipation, boredom, and imagination. When screens colonize every gap and every pause, the result is more stimuli and more information, but less creativity and meaning.

The fallacy is that by living fast, we manage to cram more into the short time allotted to us, but what Proust and Kundera foresaw is that the opposite is true. A life is not fulfilled by the number of its experiences, just as a list of events does not make a riveting narrative. What gives a story meaning is its tensions, its pauses, its intervals.

In other words: the aforementioned “in between.”

This time of year, we repeat the ancient ritual of the Omer, the counting of the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot, which is the ultimate celebration of the “in-between.” I doubt that Kundera, despite being a philosemite, knew about it, but he would have interpreted this archaic custom as a deeply counter-cultural act, a rebellion against the tyranny of Homo Highwayicus.

From a purely instrumental perspective, these days are just a bridge between liberation and revelation, between freedom and law. If the goal were only Sinai, the rational thing would be to get there as quickly as possible, collapsing the interval. That would render this period of our history meaningless.

And so the Omer does the opposite. It stretches the interval. It marks it. It gives each day a name, a number, a weight. Every evening, we repeat the same act: today is the first day, the second day, the third day, all the way to forty-nine. It is a ritualized refusal of the highway.

The Omer insists that the “between” is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a space to be inhabited. It rejects the idea that meaning lies only at the endpoints, in redemption or revelation, and instead locates it in the process of becoming.

Against the logic of instantaneity, it reintroduces delay. Against the collapse of distance, it restores separation. Against the flattening of time into a perpetual present, it creates a structure of anticipation. It reconstructs the intervals experienced by our ancestors and then goes so much further: it sacralizes them. The Omer doesn’t have a fast-forward or skip-ahead button, without which we can’t watch a Netflix show anymore. Days can’t be skipped; the only way to arrive is to pass through, to stop at every milestone, to explore every bend in the road, to feel uncertain at every fork.

The journey to freedom and community is not a straight line; it’s a winding path rather than a highway. The Omer recovers the idea that every moment has thickness and meaning. It tells us that a life that is a race is neither fulfilling nor coherent. If narratives need intervals, transformations require thresholds. There’s no anticipation without waiting, and without anticipation there is no meaning, and perhaps no joy.

The Omer has a destination and purpose: Sinai, Torah, community. In that sense it is, indeed, what philosophers call “teleological.” But not in the way that Robin Williams canonized the misreading of “carpe diem”: the idea that meaning comes from squeezing as much enjoyment as possible out of each isolated moment. The Omer gives each day meaning because it belongs to a larger journey. Purpose gives weight to the interval rather than erasing it. The Omer insists that direction does not require acceleration, that purpose does not justify the thinning out of time.

In a world organized around immediacy, availability, and speed, this is not a quaint religious relic from a bygone era. It is a radical proposition, a daring raid to rescue meaning from the hostile territory of sterile functionality.

We all enjoy getting to our destination with the speed and safety of the highway. It’s not practical, or desirable, to demolish them and replace them with paths, any more than we’d want to forego high-speed internet or immediate screen response. So the question is not whether to rebuild ancient paths on the terrain, but to rebuild them within our souls. Can we?

The Omer, in its quiet, repetitive insistence, proposes that we can, one day at a time.

Jean-Pierre Faye showed how political languages that present themselves as opposites can, at their extremes, converge in structure and logic—a dynamic later popularized as the “horseshoe theory.” This idea, which he developed in his 1972 book Langages Totalitaires, is very popular today, as differences between the Left and the Right seem to be collapsing. But Faye’s version is more interesting than the cliché. It’s not that “far left = far right,” but those extremes can begin to speak in similar ways, especially when they absolutize their claims, reject pluralism, and seek total redefinition instead of organic change.

Left-wing anti-Zionists and far-right Kahanists have, at first glance, nothing in common. One seeks to dissolve Jewish sovereignty; the other seeks to absolutize it. One speaks the language of universal ethics, the other of uncompromising power. One wants to detach Judaism from the state; the other wants to divorce Judaism from the humanistic values that sustained it for millennia.

There are, to be sure, similarities in content between the two extremes. For example, they both eschew liberal democracy, but as Faye proved, the main similarity is structural. In that sense, they are both engaged in the same project: erasure of a key element of Judaism, redefining Judaism in the image of a minority vision, and imposing that redefinition on the whole.

We are accustomed to thinking of the objectives of those movements as political, and while there are political dimensions to their actions, they are engaged in something much deeper than politics.

The anti-Zionist left does not meaningfully shape Israeli policy. There aren’t any debates in the Knesset about, for example, how Peter Beinart feels about Gaza – and of course, he knows it. That’s why the main arena of the anti-Zionist is not Jerusalem but the American Jewish community—its institutions, its language, its moral assumptions. Its project is not to change Israel, but to change what Jews believe Judaism is.

The Kahanist right, by contrast, operates within Israel and seeks political power. But its project is not merely policy either. It is an attempt to redefine Judaism as a framework of glorification of power, exclusion, and religious-national absolutism.

In other words, both are engaged in a struggle over the meaning of Judaism itself. The argument about policy is downstream from something more constitutive – a debate of what parts of Judaism need to survive and which need to be jettisoned.

A victory by either may not make Israel disappear, but it may mean the end of Judaism as we know it.

Two ideologies, one structure.

The anti-Zionist left seeks to detach Judaism from sovereignty and reduce peoplehood to universal progressive ethics. In this process, the cessation of Israel’s existence is desired, but not strictly necessary. It’s enough for them that Israel becomes a priori morally suspect and irrelevant for Diaspora Jews. A schism of sorts will ensue – The Jewish people will be split between those who cling to notions of nationhood and those who redefine Judaism in ethical terms that are equivalent to progressive morality. It doesn’t matter to them that the Land of Israel was always central to Jewish culture – and even theology, or that Jews always saw themselves as a nation and what’s more, a nation in exile. It doesn’t matter either that more than 90% of Jews see Israel as an important part of their identity.

The Kahanists, by contrast, believe that Judaism must be fully embodied in state power. Jewish sovereignty is transformed into an absolute value that is unconstrained by any other ethical norm. The state as we know it has to be replaced by another version of it, one that enforces a maximalist, exclusionary, theocratic vision. They, too, ignore a central part of Jewish identity, theology, and tradition. What’s more, their model of state represents the opposite of what Zionist thinkers – from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Rabbi Kook – envisioned. Zionism is, in its essence, a liberal democratic movement, and eliminating those elements is as ludicrous as the anti-Zionist attempt to discard nationhood.

The anti-Zionist left treats Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty as moral errors. The Kahanist right, in its own way, treats the ethical and pluralistic strands of Judaism as secondary or expendable. Despite their differences, they both share the same guiding principle: that Judaism must be detached from one of its constitutive components.

These two extremes, as noted, represent a massive break with Judaism. The genius of Judaism – and arguably one of its major contributions to the world – was the ability to strike an uneasy balance between ethics and power, particularism and universalism, nationhood and moral responsibility. Anti-Zionists and Kahanists don’t seek to re-interpret that balance; they want to break it.

Both represent what might be called a hostile takeover of Jewish identity: an attempt by a small minority to redefine the core purposes, practices, beliefs, and boundaries of the community without the assent—or against the settled intuitions—of its majority.

The anti-Zionist left does this through moral pressure and institutional activism. The Kahanist right does this through political power and ideological consolidation. But in both cases, the move is the same: shifting the argument from how we should live as Jews to what Judaism is allowed to be.

Minority Power and Moral Reframing

Putting aside our feelings about the morality or wisdom of those two extreme visions, we must admit that it’s not new that a vocal minority (in this case, each of the extremes represents between 5 and 10% of the Jewish People) seeks to redefine the nature of society. In fact, we repeat, as a virtuous thing, the phrase attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Others have made the same claim with less rhetorical flair but more academic rigor. For example, the social psychologist Serge Moscovici showed that committed minorities can produce what he called conversion: a gradual internalization of new norms by the majority, not through coercion but through persistent moral pressure.

Of course, the biggest theoreticians of minority influence was Antonio Gramsci, who showed how power operates not only through institutions but through the creation of “cultural hegemony,” that is, the ability to reshape and redefine social values and norms to the point that the new ideas become shared common sense.

So, whether we like the underlying ideology or not, it’s not illegitimate for a minority to try to change a community. But if that is true, then the opposite must also be true: A community has the right—and the obligation—to defend itself.

That defense is not, of course, suppressing dissent but maintaining the conditions of its own existence. For that, it needs a few things:

• Clarity about its purpose – when a community doesn’t have a clear vision and purpose, when it can’t articulate what it stands for, it falls prey to those that can.

• Boundaries between critique and erasure – a community can be critiqued, but trying to eliminate a basic component of a culture is not critique but erasure. A community should welcome the former and be very vigilant about the latter. If somebody tries to redefine your identity for you, you need to recognize that as cultural colonialism, not cultural critique. A community shouldn’t treat arguments that challenge its actions the same way it treats arguments that challenge its existence in its current form.

• A clear distinction between those that belong to the community and those that speak in its name. The fact that a community can include different views doesn’t mean that any of those views can present itself to the world as the unique representative of “true Judaism.”

• Community Institutions—its schools, its philanthropic structures, its communal organizations—must reflect its core commitments instead of becoming neutral platforms for any interpretation. Like communities, when institutions don’t define what they stand for, and refuse to establish normative parameters of belonging, it’s easy for militant minorities to overpower them.

• And finally, a community needs to maintain moral confidence. If a community begins to suspect that its own foundations are indefensible, it stops articulating them—and others step in to articulate something else. At that point, the takeover no longer requires persuasion. It requires only clarity.

The reason those extremes feel so dangerous now, despite their small numbers, is that our community has weakened across all those dimensions. We struggle to define what we stand for, we hesitate to establish boundaries of belonging, and many of us have lost moral conviction. That is worrisome because a community that cannot define itself cannot survive.

Generally, communities are not destroyed by argument, but they are undone by the loss of the ability to argue coherently about themselves. When they lose clarity, confidence, and boundaries, they are redefined by those who possess those things.

Whether from the left or the right is secondary, because both extremes use the same method: They destroy communities by redefining them.

Silent majorities are silent. They have power only nominally, and historically, they have been unable to defend themselves against hostile takeovers. So the solution, for those of us who cling to a Judaism that lives in creative tension between different dimensions without eliminating any, is simply to stop being silent.

The first step is to clearly diagnose our opponents and their tactics. When we confront them, we aren’t just debating policies; we’re debating something much deeper. It isn’t an argument about “how to be”, but about whether we are allowed to be what we are.

Communities that understand that distinction can absorb dissent and endure.

That makes the difference between evolving and dissolving.

Are women less rational than men? Do immigrants contribute to society? Do certain groups deserve fewer rights?

You don’t need to be a philosopher or a linguist to realize that those are not real questions but semantic ambushes. The question is structured so that one side in the conversation must prove its adequacy while the other simply waits to be convinced. In these questions, equality moves from something that is axiomatically presumed to something that needs to be demonstrated; one party stands on the dock, and the other sits in judgment.

When asked questions like that, we don’t say “let’s have a balanced debate”, we say “that is not a legitimate question.” Not because certain issues are taboo, but because we immediately recognize that the question itself carries a verdict and creates a power imbalance. Was anybody who asked questions like those ever convinced by whatever answer you give them? Of course not; the intention of the question is not to be educated about an issue, but to create an asymmetrical relationship.

Philosophers from Jürgen Habermas to Pierre Bourdieu have argued, in different ways, that communication is never entirely neutral. For Habermas, meaningful discourse requires symmetry: participants must meet as equals, with none of them forced to justify their basic standing before the conversation even begins. For Bourdieu, power operates not only through answers, but through the ability to define what counts as a legitimate question in the first place.

As Wittgenstein put it, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Some questions bewitch us in precisely this way; they appear to invite inquiry, but in fact they entangle us in a framework that already predetermines the terms of the answer. For him, the meaning of a question (or a word) lies in its use; thus, questions are not just questions, but moves within a language game that assigns roles, distributes burdens, and delimits what can be said.

These philosophers put into concepts something we know instinctively: before we answer a question, we should ask what the question is doing. Because sometimes, what it is doing is placing one side in the position of having to justify its very existence.

I call this “The Justificatory Trap.”

***

The justificatory trap occurs when a conversation is framed so that one party must defend its basic legitimacy while the other’s remains unexamined. The argument’s starting point is asymmetrical.

The trap operates subtly, disguising itself as “openness” or “free inquiry,” or the now all-to-familiar “I’m just asking questions.” We fall into this trap because it weaponizes the values we hold dear against us -like the free exchange of ideas- against us.

But sometimes, when we agree to “debate difficult questions,” we don’t realize that the difficulty is not evenly distributed. One side doesn’t need to justify anything, while the other needs to justify its very right to be. Once you accept that frame, you are no longer an equal interlocutor. You are a defendant.

We are confronted with – and often fall for – the justificatory trap in most conversations about Zionism.

There are, of course, legitimate questions to ask about Zionism as a national liberation movement. We ask questions about other national movements to better understand them either academically or politically. We may ask, “What is the history of a national movement?” “What are its internal debates?” “How are ideological disputes reflected in policy?” And of course, we do ask questions about a country’s policies and their moral consequences.

What we don’t ask is: “Does this movement have a right to exist at all?” This question does not operate at the same level. It does not critique actions or evaluate policies; it interrogates being. It places identity itself on trial. And when that question is asked asymmetrically—of one group and not of others—it becomes bigotry.

Consider how conversations about Zionism generally start. Not What is Zionism?
Not: What are its historical roots? Not: What should Israel do? But: Is Zionism legitimate?

At first glance, it appears to be just another difficult question—provocative, perhaps, but within the bounds of acceptable debate. But the moment it is posed, the burden of proof shifts. Zionism is no longer a historical movement to be understood but a claim that must justify itself before anything else can be discussed. Thus, its existence becomes provisional and its legitimacy contingent. When you are asked that question, you are not being called to be a participant in a conversation; you are being called to the stand.

Of course, criticism of policies and governments is normal and acceptable. You can see what ardent Zionists – like myself – say about the current Israeli government. But the key difference is that policy scrutiny operates within a framework. We argue about what states do, not whether entire peoples are entitled to national self-determination. We debate French policy. We do not routinely ask whether France should exist. We critique Indian nationalism. We do not begin by asking whether Indians have a right to national expression. We analyze the Italian Risorgimento. We do not place Italian unification on trial as a moral anomaly.

In virtually all cases, the legitimacy of a people’s aspiration to self-determination is the starting point of the conversation, but with Zionism, that order is often reversed. The legitimacy question is perpetually reopened and never settled.

We, of course, should not fall into that trap.

The problem is not just one of rhetoric, not only one of unfair framing of public debate, and not exclusively a problem of antisemitic double standard. There’s a deeper and more insidious danger of the justificatory trap, one that is not external but internal.

Repeated exposure to justificatory frameworks starts to reshape identity. Women know this all too well. When entering academia or leadership, they internalize and anticipate the explanatory logic. They often feel the need to overperform, preemptively demonstrate competence, and avoid mistakes that would “confirm” the stereotype. Internalization is not just being judged; it is anticipating the judgment, being permanently aware of it to the point that it shapes how you think and how you act.

Immigrants’ families know this, too. Many of them quietly accept that their belonging is conditional on contribution and develop an entire ethos of overachievement and self-justification based on the value they add to society. Many of us, Jews, know that from our own family experience. Phrases like “we are not from here, so we need to work doubly hard” are accepted and repeated uncritically – they even pass for virtue, unaware of the internalized unfairness they express.

In these cases, as with Zionism, the group is subjected to a foundational question that places its legitimacy in doubt. The group keeps answering the question, but no answer really settles the matter. Over time, the question becomes anticipated, internalized, and, what’s worse, structuring of one’s identity.

As Frantz Fanon, who’s often weaponized by anti-Zionists, wrote, “I am overdetermined from without.”

In other words, the most serious risk of the justificatory trap – in the case of Zionism and in many others – is that it’s not just an unfair debate technique but a technology of identity formation. By participating in the conversation, we accept its premise, and we step into the role assigned to us. We don’t live our story; we defend it.

What, then, is the alternative?

Not silence. Not withdrawal. And certainly not the claim that Zionism—or any political movement—is beyond critique.

The alternative is to refuse distorted frames.

We must distinguish clearly between conversations that seek understanding and conversations that demand prior justification, engage fully in the former and challenge (and refuse) the structure of the latter.

When confronted with a question like “Is Zionism legitimate?”, the first task is not to answer it but to examine it.

Why is this question being asked? What assumptions does it carry? Who is required to justify what—and why?

In other words: question the question. For example: “Do you ask the same of other national movements? Why not? Why do I need to justify my legitimacy, and you don’t? Isn’t this the bigotry of double standards?”

Questions like these or others are not just debating techniques; they restore symmetry to the conversation by refusing to accept asymmetry as its starting point.

Zionism is something worth discussing. It’s one of the most inspiring national liberation movements ever, one that fought against three empires and succeeded. One that created a complex and successful society and a thriving country against insurmountable odds. It is also a movement that displayed – and still does – enormous intellectual creativity and ideological richness.

Because of that, speaking about Zionism is valid and necessary for both Jews and non-Jews. We need to learn about its intellectual origins, its internal diversity, and its many moral dilemmas. We can analyze its political choices and learn from its successes and failures.

These questions, however, can only take place genuinely and meaningfully if the participants enter them as equals without anybody needing to justify their own existence. That is the standard we apply elsewhere, and if it isn’t met, we should simply refuse to engage.

***

There are questions that illuminate, enrich, and expand our thinking. Others close inquiry before it begins. The most dangerous questions of all hide behind benign invitations to dialogue while surreptitiously assigning one side the burden of proving that it merits existing at all.

Those questions don’t deserve an answer. It’s not only futile to engage with them, but dangerous.

If the game begins with you on trial, the best move is not to play.

Contemporary Jewish discourse often feels like a semantic race against substance. There is indeed a familiar rhythm in the way we talk about Judaism. When we can’t - or don’t want to - define the content and substance of Jewish Life, we use a cluster of words that sound profound but mean very little: continuity, identity, peoplehood, Jewish values.

These terms serve both as avoidance mechanisms and as reductionist devices. By talking about something vague and undefinable, like identity, we avoid harder conversations about what Jewish Life actually entails. By speaking of peoplehood, we reduce Judaism to one of its dimensions. In most cases, the usage of these terms seeks to offer Jews a sense of belonging “on the cheap,” that is, without making any meaningful demands.

I want to focus on “Jewish Values” because it may be the most seductive of them all. It carries moral weight and ethical heft, without demanding serious engagement with Jewish practice of text. It gestures towards a tradition, but it doesn’t bind us much to its normative core. In other words, it allows us to speak in the name of Judaism while remaining comfortably modern.

There are, however, deep problems with this concept.

To begin with, the word values does not appear anywhere in the Bible or the Talmud. It is, in fact, a modern invention designed to deal with a modern problem: the weakening of traditional sources of morality and authority. Thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche used the term Werte to describe competing systems of meaning in a disenchanted world—no longer commanded, but chosen. Later, Max Weber would describe a world of plural “value spheres,” often in conflict, reflecting a fractured moral universe that replaced the moral monopoly (and coercion) of the Middle Ages.

“Values,” in other words, are what remain when commandment becomes optional. They are the vocabulary of a world in which authority has thinned, obligation has softened, and meaning has become a matter of preference.

Sociologist Talcott Parsons theorized this further. “Values” became the abstract standards that guide action within a complex society. To fulfill that role, they must be sufficiently general to be shared, internalized, and flexible enough to accommodate pluralism. Religion, in this framework, becomes a carrier of values, reinforcing consensus rather than imposing obligation. What Parsons describes sociologically helps explain what we experience culturally: values are the moral language of a world that can no longer sustain thick, authoritative systems of obligation.

Later thinkers deepened this critique. Charles Taylor traced the shift from received obligation to chosen identity and, later, Hannah Arendt went further still, warning that the very term “values,” borrowed from economics, renders moral claims comparable and ultimately exchangeable.

This approach differs sharply from traditional Judaism.

Judaism, as we saw, doesn’t speak of values, but of mitzvot. It’s more about obligations than about ideals, more about commands than preferences. What we admire is less relevant to what we are required to do.

The core categories of Jewish life are not values, but mitzvah, aveirah, zechut, chova, commandment, transgression, merit, and obligation. These terms point to a juridical, behavioral, and covenantal framework. They presume a relationship between a people and God, and between individuals within that people, and a normative, binding law. By contrast, the phrase “Jewish values” emerged gradually in the 20^th century as Jews sought to translate a tradition of law and covenantal obligation into the moral language of modern society. Its great advantage for American Jews was that it allowed Judaism to be invoked without being obeyed, or even studied in depth.

In a culture of expressive individuals, the language of values transforms a commanded life into an expressive one. It replaces ‘You shall’ with ‘I feel’.

It’s not that speaking about Jewish values is bad per se. One can distill what we call “values” from rabbinic sources. It is impossible to read halakhic literature without identifying underlying values, as, according to the textbook definitions, “enduring beliefs about what is good or desirable.” The sanctity of life, the obligation to care for the stranger—these can indeed be derived.

Given that Judaism has an inferred system of values, we can say that using the term is not wrong, but an attempt to translate ancient ideas into a language intelligible to modern people. However, many things can be lost in that translation, and the risks of using those terms uncritically are not just philosophical but practical.

“Jewish values” has become a remarkably efficient rhetorical device. It allows us to retrofit Judaism to whatever we already believe. Want to argue for social justice? Invoke “Jewish values of tzedek.” Want to defend market capitalism? Invoke “Jewish values of property and individual agency.” Environmentalism? “Jewish values of stewardship.” Universalism? “Jews values of human dignity.” Nationalism? Also, “the Jewish value of peoplehood.” Organizations on both the far right and the far left - and everybody in between - use the term to mean everything and anything. Naturally, recognizing the power and fungibility of the term, everyone seeks to claim it.

Crucially, “Jewish values” allows institutions to avoid harder questions. It is much easier to rally people around “values” than around obligations. Values inspire; mitzvot bind. Values are inclusive; commandments discriminate—they draw lines, demand choices, impose limits. Why tell Jews that they have to learn sources, practice rituals, speak a Jewish language, or create Jewish culture, when it’s much simpler to tell them only to adhere to a certain moral mood that they already share?

This is why “Jewish values” belongs to the same family as identity, peoplehood, and continuity.

Each of these terms performs a similar function: they create the appearance of substance while deferring the question of content. Identity tells us that being Jewish matters—but not what that means. Peoplehood tells us we belong—but not to what, or why. Continuity tells us we should persist—but not what is worth continuing. Values tells us Judaism stands for something, but not what it obligates.

They are placeholders for conversations we are reluctant to have.

Saving Values

As we noted above, at the root of our fascination with the language of values lies a valid intuition: the need to translate Judaism to the moral and conceptual language of modernity. When society spoke in terms of values, Jews had to adapt to be part of the conversation. When many Jews also think and speak in modern concepts, Judaism has to learn the language.

That is legitimate, as long as we remember that the translation is not accurate or complete. We know this from another example: the translation of Judaism into “religion.” Judaism is a religion—but not only a religion. It also contains elements of nationhood, peoplehood, and shared destiny that the category cannot fully capture. Yet once the translation takes hold, it reshapes the conversation.

The same is true of values.

Indeed, thoughtful figures recognize the risk early on.

Louis Jacobs, who did much to mainstream the concept (in 1960, he wrote what is probably the first major work on “Jewish Values”), raises some cautionary notes. He grounds values in halakhic and textual sources and treats them as emerging from mitzvot rather than as replacements for them. Max Kadushin tried to refine the idea of values when applied to Judaism. For Kadushin, the moral language of Judaism consisted of “value-concepts”—fluid, tacit, and inseparable from the lived texture of halakhah, study, and communal life. They were not items on a list but currents in a system, taking on meaning only in context and in tension with one another.

By contrast, what passes today as “Jewish values” reads like the product of a nonprofit branding exercise: a set of declarative, universally accepted principles - justice, compassion, repair—that can be divorced from their sources, arranged on a website, and made to underwrite whatever program happens to be at hand. What is lost is precisely what made those concepts Jewish in the first place: their embeddedness, their ambiguity, and their capacity to bind rather than merely to inspire.

And yet, it would be too easy—and too modern in its own way—to simply discard the language of values. First, as we noted, the language of values is too ingrained in our culture to simply eliminate it. Second, if we jettisoned “values” and replaced it with another buzzword, we would have gained nothing.

So the challenge is how to “thicken” the term. To imagine what it would mean to speak of Jewish values in a way that doesn’t dissolve Judaism into personal preference or a popularity to please modern sensitivities.

Perhaps it would require three shifts.

First, inverting the pyramid.

As Jacobs and Kadushin proposed, we should treat values as emerging from texts, practices, and traditions. Not the other way around. In other words, accept that covenant precedes values. Values shouldn’t be vague appeals, but arguments grounded in a canon and in deep knowledge. Values can’t replace education and practice.

Second, moving from universal values to the particularity of obligation and practice.

A value that does not translate into some form of obligation—ritual, ethical, communal—is not yet Jewish in any meaningful sense. Most “Jewish” values are or have become universal. For a value to be “Jewish,” it must be anchored in particularism. The fact that we supposedly invented certain values doesn’t make them Jewish. Most cultures value justice and generosity. What makes those values Jewish is the way in which they are expressed. Jewish generosity as an abstract value is no different from Christian generosity, but tzedakah, as a structured obligation, is different from Christian charity.

Third, from values to tension.

Authentic Jewish thought is rarely harmonious. It is structured by competing claims and axiological dilemmas: justice and mercy, particularism and universalism, law and compassion. A discourse of “values” that presents Judaism as a seamless moral system is not only simplistic; it is unfaithful to its sources. In Judaism, no value is absolute, and any value always works in opposition to another.

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At its core, the problem with “Jewish values” is not that it is wrong, but that it is insufficient. It reflects a broader shift in modern life—from covenant to expression. By speaking of values, we no longer ask, “What is demanded of me?” but “What resonates with me?”

“Jewish values” fits perfectly into that shift. It allows Judaism to survive in a world of hyper-empowered individuals—but at the potential cost of transforming it into something else.

The challenge, then, is not to abandon the language of values, but to resist its most comforting tendencies; to insist that Judaism is not only a set of ideals we endorse, but a framework that makes claims upon us. To acknowledge that the language of “values”, like that of “religion”, can’t faithfully capture the unique nature of Judaism. We must balance the modern vocabulary of values with the more ancient notion of covenant. Otherwise, Judaism becomes not a tradition that forms us, but a mirror in which we see ourselves.

The images from Israel after every missile attack always bring me to tears. The resilience of regular Israelis is probably one of the most inspiring sights in the world. The Tel Aviv cafés that reopen the next morning, the wedding in a bomb shelter, the farmer who harvests his crop under fire—they all fill me with pride in being part of the Jewish people. I say, to friends and foes alike, the words of the psalmist: “Ashrei ha’am shekacha lo”—happy is the people that has such a spirit.

Resilience is universally praised. It has become a key concept in psychology—something that epitomizes the best possible outcome after trauma. In her seminal work, Ann Masten called it “ordinary magic,” because it is exercised by “normal” individuals rather than cartoon heroes. In our case, resilience has become central to Israeli and Jewish self-understanding—and, of course, to political discourse. And rightly so: Jewish resilience is what allowed us to survive, and Israeli resilience made an improbable project succeed against incommensurable odds.

And yet, I have a nagging feeling these days: that there is a dark side to resilience.

What does it cost a society to be perpetually resilient? What does it do to the psyche, the politics, and the moral imagination of a people when preventable abnormality becomes the background noise of normal life?

Psychological resilience is generally defined as the capacity to adapt and continue developing in the face of severe adversity. It literally means “bouncing back.” American psychologist Norman Garmezy helped pioneer the concept, followed by others such as Emmy Werner, Michael Rutter, and Ann Masten. The definition I personally prefer is that of French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik—himself a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis as a child while his entire family perished in Auschwitz—whose 1999 book Un merveilleux malheur brought resilience into mainstream cultural discourse. Cyrulnik defined it as “the resumption of a new development after a traumatic block.”

But from early on, many thinkers began to see the risks of glorifying resilience.

Indeed, there is a body of literature on trauma normalization, describing what begins as an adaptive coping mechanism and later becomes a pathology: the soldier who cannot turn off hypervigilance, the community that loses the capacity to be outraged, the person who functions so well that they never process what happened to them.

Robert Jay Lifton coined the term “psychic numbing.” Suppressing pain or outrage is adaptive in the short term—it allows people to function amid horror—but it becomes deeply problematic when it persists. On a personal level, it can lead to withdrawal, depression, and an impaired ability to respond to ongoing danger. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman explains how trauma requires acknowledgment to be processed, and how a misplaced sense of normalcy can actually prevent recovery in the long term.

The problematic aspect of resilience at the personal level is mirrored in the social and political dimensions. In Resilience, Resistance: A Commentary on the Historical Origins of Resilience, psychiatrist Helena Winston argues that resilience has become a political concept that shifts responsibility for systemic problems onto individuals—asking people to cope better rather than demanding that the system function better. Boris Cyrulnik himself has complained about the misuse of the term he helped popularize. Governments, he says, have latched onto it to tell citizens: “Be resilient! Hold fast, manage on your own, without help from the State.” He called this a betrayal of the concept, since all scientific evidence shows that resilience is only possible with social, emotional, and material support—not in its absence.

Which takes us back to Israel.

When a population demonstrates that it can absorb punishment and keep functioning, the political pressure to end the punishment is reduced. The communities of the Gaza envelope were resilient for twenty years. Twenty years. Rockets, “red alerts,” and infiltration warnings became normalized. Their political demands—to actually solve the security problem, not merely manage it—were not met. For years, Israeli governments looked at the situation in the south and made a calculation: this is sustainable. The people are managing. The deterrence equation is working well enough.

As we now know, it wasn’t working. But “resilience” made it look like it was.

Let me be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying the café should close or the wedding in the shelter should be canceled. Functioning is praiseworthy—it is a form of heroism.

What I am saying is this: there is a difference between resilience and numbness. From the outside, they can look identical. Both allow life to continue. But one is a healthy adaptation; the other is dissociation—a systematic suppression of the signal that something is genuinely, catastrophically wrong.

Before October 7th, the residents of the Gaza envelope were not resilient in the clinical sense. They exhibited higher levels of PTSD, trauma, and depression than the Israeli average. They were coping as best they could. But successive governments found it very convenient to praise their resilience while shifting attention (and army units) elsewhere. The failure of October 7 has many causes, but it was made possible in part because the communities of the Gaza envelope had been demonstrating resilience for so long that the political system effectively decided their situation was “manageable.” The government could point to their resilience as proof that the status quo was sustainable.

A similar dynamic is visible as I write these lines. The north of Israel is being pummeled by rocket fire from Hezbollah—an enemy about whom the Israeli prime minister said a year ago: “We have set it back decades, eliminated its top leaders, destroyed most of its rockets and missiles.” Just two weeks ago, and only under significant pressure, the government reversed its decision to defund relief programs in the north in order to funnel more money to coalition partners. It is as if the government were saying: Don’t worry about the people up north—they are resilient.

I, for one, do not want the north of Israel to be merely resilient; I want it to be angry.

Conveniently, resilience has helped eliminate outrage as a political force. Paradoxically, it has made the residents’ plight easier to ignore. The moment a society stops being shocked by what should remain shocking, it has lost something essential—not the capacity to function, but the capacity to demand. The capacity to say: this is not normal, and we will not accept it as normal.

And this must be said clearly: it is not normal that after two and a half years of war, Hezbollah can still terrorize Israel. It is not normal that a country that defeated five Arab armies in six days nearly sixty years ago has not yet secured a definitive victory against a much weaker enemy. It’s not normal that reservists are serving for months on end while large swaths of the population are exempted from service. It’s not normal that heroic and mind-blowing military achievements are not translated into diplomatic victories. That does not call for resilience—it calls for outrage.

The valorization of resilience, taken too far, becomes the valorization of endurance. And endurance, when it is not translated politically into a demand for change, is just suffering with better PR.

So what is the alternative?

The alternative is not paralysis, but the political translation of pain. The opposite of numbing is not breakdown—it is outrage channeled into demand. Israeli society’s famous resilience seems, at times, to have substituted for that translation rather than enabling it.

Resilience has been co-opted—by governments, by propaganda, by cultural pressure—into a performance of strength that substitutes for genuine safety.

Real resilience would look different: it would be angrier, louder, more demanding. It would be the café owner who says: I am open because I refuse to give in—AND I am furious, AND this must stop, AND I will not rest until it does.

The families of the hostages have refused—magnificently—to perform the expected resilience. Week after week, they have stood in public and said: “This is not normal. Do not treat it as normal. Do not move on. Do not let this become background noise.” They were subjected to smear campaigns; they were accused of being difficult, of making people uncomfortable, of refusing to let the country function. It turns out, they were showing true resilience, not passive acceptance of suffering.

I would love to see the same mobilization now, rather than postings on social media about Seders in the shelter, or at least alongside it.

It is precisely because I believe in Israel—in its people, in its extraordinary and improbable existence—that I want more for it than managed suffering. I want it to have the safety that makes resilience unnecessary. I want the children of Kiryat Shmona to grow up without rocket drills—not because of any particular ideological position about how the conflict should be resolved, but because children deserve safety, and their capacity to function amid danger should never have been mistaken for proof that the danger was acceptable.

The dark side of resilience is that it can make the intolerable look tolerable. It can make governments comfortable, citizens numb, and the world admiring—all while the actual problem—the one that requires courage, political will, and genuine risk to solve—goes unaddressed.

Israel is capable of so much more than endurance. It always has been. The same people who built a country from nothing, who turned desert into garden, who created one of the most dynamic societies on earth—those people deserve a government and a strategy worthy of their resilience. Not a government that relies on their capacity to absorb punishment, but one that protects them from it.

Remember: the slogan we cherish is not “Am Yisrael sored”—the people of Israel survives—but chai. Lives.

Israelis deserve more than survival. Much more.

Frans de Waal and Robert Sapolsky conducted extensive studies on the social behaviors of primates, especially those closest to humans, such as chimpanzees and baboons. They showed that apes are, in a very real sense, political animals. Leadership and hierarchy are central to their social organization. In different ways, they both observed that it is not the strongest or the smartest individual who becomes the leader, but the one who projects the greatest self-assuredness.

If there was any doubt that humans are primates, this should dispel it. We flatter ourselves that we are superior to other apes, but in truth, we have not transcended that baboonish trait; we have merely refined it. We still follow those who signal certainty, mistaking the absence of doubt for the presence of truth.

Judaism always distrusted that instinct. Perhaps that’s why our foundational myth, the story of Passover, is in fact an indictment of certainty, a devastating critique of those who act as though they possess the truth.

Pharaoh is, of course, one such figure. He claims to be a god, never wrong, endowed with the divine right to enslave and kill. Surrounded by sycophants who praise his every move, he becomes convinced of his own infallibility. The Bible tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but the rabbis suggest that it was already a block of granite, impervious even to a hairline fracture of doubt.

Opposing Pharaoh stands Moses, a man consumed by doubt: doubt about himself, about his mission, even about God. These two leaders mirror their peoples. The Egyptians obey, even in the face of plagues; they neither question nor revolt, remaining subservient to their “always-right” king. The Israelites… well, they drive Moses to exasperation: “What shall I do with this people?” The king leads sheep; the doubter leads doubters. And yet there are no questions about God’s preference: the troublesome doubters are chosen, not the obedient followers.

So central is doubt that questions, the manifestation of doubt, are the centerpiece of the Seder. Free people do not obey blindly; they demand to be told the story; they insist on explanations. From an early age, children are granted not only the right but the duty to question their parents. But free people must also doubt themselves.

To doubt is to embark on a journey, an expedition into the unknown guided by hope. In that journey, faith and doubt are intertwined; neither can exist without the other.

The story of Passover teaches that certainty, especially the boasting of certainty, is more than obnoxious. It shapes societies, corrupts values, and ultimately leads to tragedy.

Anatole France captured this powerfully:

“When we study the history of humanity, we realize that, if people massacre one another without respite, it is above all because they are unable to doubt. Doubt is gentleness; it is compassion; it is the source of all good.”

Doubt, for France, is not opposed to belief:

“We believe, but we believe doubting, and we doubt believing.”

He was right. Throughout history, it has been the certainty of possessing the truth that has made people cruel. As Bertrand Russell famously observed:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Doubt is not weakness, nor a failure of belief; it is a necessary condition of intellectual honesty. It prevents conviction from hardening into tyranny. In uncertain times, like ours, only fools and fanatics claim to be always right, to harbor no doubts.

And yet, our primate instinct proves stubborn. Generation after generation, and even now, we follow the ape that beats its chest the hardest, even when it is breaking its own ribs. If confidence is displayed with sufficient force, we will listen, and we will follow.

Perhaps that is why the questions of the Seder are a yearly ritual: to remind us that doubt is rare, and that it must be cultivated. And perhaps that is why those questions are never fully answered. The questions endure; the answers remain personal, evolving, fluid. I have answered “Why is this night different?” in many different ways throughout my life, reflecting my hopes, my fears, my frustrations, my growth, and my mistakes. The search for a single, definitive answer has been one of the most dangerous illusions in human history, and perhaps an affront to a God who cherishes doubt. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

“We are nearer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

But is permanent doubt sustainable? Can doubt itself be taken too far? Am I suggesting that those who say “I’m just asking questions” are in the right?

Doubt is not nihilism, and this is where conspiracy theorists go wrong. True doubt exists within a structure of trust. In the Seder, the child asks because he trusts his parents. He is not rejecting everything and trusting his own flawed judgment; he is questioning from within a framework of belonging. His doubts are anchored in a community that honors them.

Conspiracy theorists who claim to be “just asking questions” practice what we might call pseudo-doubt, a form of discourse that weaponizes doubt rather than using it in the search for truth. How can we tell? Because they question everything except themselves.

As Jean Birnbaum writes in Le Courage de la nuance:

“The courage of nuance is the willingness to be shaken in one’s own certainties.”

This test never fails: if you want to distinguish a true doubter from a nihilist who merely cloaks certainty in skepticism, ask whether they ever doubt themselves, whether they ever admit being wrong. The person who uses doubt to disengage from community or to assert superiority is not free, but enslaved to their own ego.

In times of uncertainty and fear, our task is to resist the siren call of those who project certainty. Instead, we must braid doubt, belief, and belonging into a triple cord, flexible, resilient, and unbreakable.

As Isaiah Berlin wrote:

“To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized person from a barbarian.”

So this Passover, we face a choice: to hold our convictions with the winning formula of passion and humility, or to continue acting like baboons.

Chag Sameach!

“When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

This subjectivization of language, so characteristic of our times, is no longer the playful paradox Lewis Carroll intended. It carries epistemic and social risks. If words can be made to mean whatever we wish, they lose their ability to describe reality and become blunt instruments—tools not of clarification, but of dismissal.

What begins as linguistic drift can end in semantic collapse: a word loses its descriptive precision and becomes a vehicle for judgment—undifferentiated, indiscriminate, and immune to argument.

Semantic collapse is all around us. The right deploys “woke” as a catch-all term of disapproval, rarely defined and endlessly elastic. The left invokes “fascist” with similar looseness, often without clarifying the criteria by which the label applies. Terms like “progressive” or “nationalist” are hollowed out, reduced to signals of belonging or exclusion rather than meaningful descriptions.

There is, however, one term that seems to attract universal disdain: legacy.

The Word That Became a Verdict

“Legacy” has become a standard term of critique. One hears that “legacy media won’t cover this,” that “legacy institutions have lost their authority,” that “legacy organizations are out of touch.” Yet those who use the term rarely define it. Who, exactly, counts as “legacy”? By what criteria?

The word now functions less as a description than as a verdict—a shorthand for dismissing those whose authority we reject. It carries the force of an argument without the inconvenience of having to make one. It has become a vague slur to attack those with whom we disagree.

This is a curious transformation. “Legacy” once referred to inheritance, continuity, the transmission of value across generations. A legacy was something received—often imperfect, sometimes burdensome, but never meaningless. It implied a relationship: to the past, to institutions, to norms that preceded us and might outlast us.

Today, it signals obsolescence or even moral inadequacy.

From System to Slur

The term originated in the world of technology. “Legacy systems” described older infrastructures—functional, but built for a different era and often difficult to integrate with newer technologies. It was a neutral, even useful distinction.

But the term migrated. From codebases to newsrooms, from operating systems to philanthropic organizations, from databases to communal structures. And in the process, it lost its specificity.

“Legacy media” no longer refers simply to older business models; it now implies bias, capture, and untrustworthiness.
“Legacy organizations” no longer denote long-established bodies; they mean bureaucratic, self-serving, or irrelevant.

The term becomes elastic enough to mean almost anything—and therefore nothing in particular. It becomes a placeholder for dissatisfaction, a way of saying: these are the institutions I do not trust, the authorities I do not recognize.

In a culture that treats disruption as a moral good, to call something “legacy” is to claim, implicitly, the virtues of innovation, relevance, and even moral clarity—without having to demonstrate them.

The Collapse of Distinctions

There are, of course, institutions that deserve criticism—sometimes severe criticism. Some are sclerotic, others captured by internal interests, others simply ineffective. Some have failed to adapt; others have adapted in precisely the wrong ways.

But the category “legacy” does not distinguish among them. It collapses the difference between the corrupt and the merely imperfect, between the self-serving and the constrained, between the obsolete and the deliberately cautious.

A newsroom that verifies sources before publication and one that buries inconvenient truths may both be dismissed as “legacy.”
A communal organization that moves slowly because it must balance competing constituencies and one that moves slowly because it lacks urgency may be delegitimized with the same word.

Because the critics are not interested in improvement, but in posture, we miss an opportunity to have a meaningful debate about our institutions. In fact, in most cases, the blanket criticism of “legacy” is not meant to say anything about legacy institutions, but rather to make the critic look enlightened.

Constraint and Friction

If one listens carefully, a pattern emerges. What is often rejected as “legacy” is not simply age or inertia. It is constraint.

“Legacy” institutions tend to be those that:

• apply standards

• impose procedures

• say “no”

• require justification

• are accountable to norms beyond the preferences of any one individual

In other words, they are institutions in the full sense of the term: bodies that mediate between impulse and action, between desire and legitimacy.

To call them “legacy” is frequently to express frustration with friction. It is a complaint not about failure, but about limits.

This is particularly visible in the media. The move away from so-called “legacy media” has often been framed as a liberation—an escape from gatekeepers, from editorial bias, from institutional inertia. And there is truth in this critique. Gatekeeping can become exclusion; editorial judgment can become ideological conformity.

But the rejection of gatekeeping is also the rejection of standards. The bypassing of editors is also the bypassing of verification. The removal of friction is also the removal of discipline—and, with it, the erosion of standards.

The Replacement Problem

Institutions do not disappear into a vacuum. When they are delegitimized, something replaces them.

The question is not whether we will have institutions, but what kind.

In media, the weakening of established outlets has not produced a neutral space of unmediated truth. It has produced a landscape shaped by personalities, platforms, and algorithms—systems in which visibility is determined less by accuracy than by engagement, less by verification than by virality.

The alternative to flawed editorial institutions is not neutrality, but a different—and often less accountable—set of gatekeepers.

When people say, “I don’t trust the CDC, I do my own research,” they are not doing anything of the kind. They are simply trusting somebody else they found on the internet – somebody with infinitely less knowledge and, usually, with a financial interest in selling them miracle, unregulated food supplements.

The alternative to flawed institutions is not “no institution.” It is unaccountable power – generally captured by the unscrupulous.

The Jewish Communal Case

These dynamics are particularly visible in Jewish communal life, where “legacy organizations” have become frequent targets of critique.

The criticisms are not without merit. Many institutions are indeed bureaucratic. Some are distant from the constituencies they serve. Others have struggled to adapt to new realities and new forms of engagement.

And yet, these same institutions perform functions that are difficult to replicate:

• they mobilize resources at scale

• they respond to crises with coordination and speed

• they maintain infrastructure—physical, financial, relational—that cannot be improvised overnight

• they provide forms of representation that, however imperfect, carry a degree of legitimacy that others lack.

To dismiss them wholesale as “legacy” is to risk eroding the very capacities that make collective action possible.

More often than not, what is really at stake is access, influence, and resources. The language of “legacy” allows these struggles to be framed as moral critiques rather than self-interested endeavors.

In many cases, the critique of legacy organizations is simply based on willful ignorance. In my professional capacity, I often hear refrains like “why aren’t legacy organizations doing X”, generally referring to programs that they’ve been doing for years. It’s easier to criticize than to investigate. Fringe organizations that claim to be “more representative” demand a portion of, for example, the Jewish federation budget, ignoring that federations’ allocations are subject to fiduciary responsibility and long processes of consensus-building. Jewish federations rarely have a budget as such; rather, they are responsible for allocating funds in accordance with their donors’ intent.

The other – obvious – part of the fallacy is that if anti-legacy were so much better at channeling the community’s true feelings and showing smashing successes, they’d have no problem raising more money. In other words, these groups are not against legacy; they are against not being the ones who control the purse strings.

This is not to exempt any organization from scrutiny. It is to note that the language of “legacy” often substitutes for analysis. It allows critics to claim superiority without demonstrating effectiveness.

Critique Without Nihilism

None of this is an argument against critique. On the contrary, critique is essential. Institutions that cannot be questioned tend to decay. Authority that cannot be challenged tends to ossify.

But critique must itself be disciplined.

There is a difference between criticism that clarifies and criticism that dissolves. Between a critique that specifies failures and a critique that dismisses wholesale. Between reform and repudiation.

Good critique asks:

• What, precisely, is failing?

• Why is it failing?

• What should be preserved?

• What should be changed?

• What would replace it—and how would that alternative be held accountable?

Bad critique relies on gestures:

• “out of touch”

• “irrelevant”

• “captured”

• “legacy”

These are not arguments. They are signals. We must ask these questions of specific organizations, not of a whole class of them.

These distinctions require effort. They demand evidence. They resist easy generalization, but they also make real critique possible. Language matters because it shapes perception, and perception shapes action. When our vocabulary collapses, so does our judgment.

Inheritance

These lines are in part self-critical. I, too, have at times joined the chorus of those who critique an entire class of organizations wholesale. To be sure, I still believe that organizations built on early 20th-century organizational models need to change and adapt. Yet, there’s something distressing about the current anti-legacy mood. It straddles the spectrum between unfair and irresponsible, between simplistic and nefarious.

A legacy is not, in fact, a relic. It is an inheritance.

Inheritance is rarely simple. It binds us to things we did not choose. It confronts us with structures we did not design. It imposes obligations we may not fully accept.

But it also provides resources we did not create and could not easily recreate.

The task is not to accept or reject our inheritance wholesale, but to discern—to decide what to carry forward, what to reform, and what to leave behind.

To dismiss something as “legacy” is, in a sense, to refuse that task.

But societies—and communities—are not built from scratch each generation. They are built, for better and worse, from what they inherit.

The problem is not that we have legacy institutions. The problem is that we are losing the ability to tell which ones still matter.

One of the most consequential military actions the United States has undertaken in decades is being conducted without a coherent attempt to explain it to the American people.

The recent strikes against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure—whatever one thinks of Donald Trump’s presidency more broadly—are arguably among the most justifiable uses of American force in recent memory. Iran has spent decades building a nuclear program in defiance of international agreements, sponsoring militias across the Middle East, threatening American allies, and openly calling for the destruction of Israel. The regime’s ambitions are not ambiguous, nor are the dangers of allowing it to cross the nuclear threshold. Besides liberating the long-suffering Iranian people, this military operation can reshape the Middle East in unimaginably positive ways. And even if it didn’t, degrading Iran’s military capacity is an unqualified good.

And yet the American public has received remarkably little in the way of a clear rationale for the operation.

There have been statements, of course. Tweets, short remarks, scattered – and contradictory - justifications. But there has been no sustained effort to articulate the strategic logic of the war: what the objective is, how success will be defined, what risks are being managed, and what the broader regional vision might be.

This is unfortunate because the case for the operation is strong. If the United States is ever justified in using force, preventing a fundamentalist regime with a penchant for mass murder from acquiring nuclear weapons while it actively destabilizes an entire region undoubtedly qualifies.

But the administration’s failure to explain the war reflects something deeper than a communications oversight. It reflects two troubling features of our political moment.

The first is cultural.

The political processes that emerged out of the Enlightenment were built on the assumption of rational persuasion. As Jurgen Habermas wrote: “The legitimacy of law depends on the discursive process… in which citizens participate through argument.” In this model, policy emerges out of a process of argumentation in which sides are called to “make the case”. Alas, we no longer live in a political culture that places much value on that idea. The notion that leaders should patiently explain their reasoning, present evidence, and persuade the public feels almost quaint. Politics has increasingly become a theater of instinct rather than argument.

The operative currency today is not persuasion but vibe.

Public life is organized around gut feelings, tribal loyalties, and emotional signals. Arguments rarely change minds; narratives are quickly filtered through partisan lenses. In such an environment, leaders may reasonably conclude that the effort to construct a careful public justification is futile. Why bother building a detailed case if half the country will dismiss it automatically and the other half will support you regardless?

This is not a problem unique to Trump, but his political style (and the visceral reactions he generates) has certainly accelerated it. The administration seems to assume that Americans will either instinctively support the action or instinctively oppose it—and that no amount of explanation will meaningfully shift those instincts.

But there is a second, more troubling reason behind the lack of clarity.

We are increasingly living in a political culture in which aspiring strongmen believe that explanation itself signals weakness.

In democratic leadership, justification is part of the job. Leaders must persuade. They must articulate goals and defend decisions. The legitimacy of power rests in part on the ability to explain why it is being exercised.

National emergencies don’t invalidate that principle. During World War II, Churchill famously declared, “It is the duty of His Majesty’s government to explain the conduct of the war to the Parliament, and it is the Parliament’s duty to examine the government’s conduct of the war.”

Autocratic leadership operates differently.

The strongman does not argue; he proclaims. He does not persuade; he expects belief.

In this model, explanation is unnecessary and even undesirable. To explain is to acknowledge that the public has a right to evaluate the reasoning. But the strongman’s authority rests on the opposite premise: that the leader possesses a kind of instinctive wisdom that does not need to be justified.

In such systems, contradictions are not problems to be clarified but puzzles for followers to interpret. The leader’s opaque pronouncements become signals of hidden strategic genius. It is up to the audience to reconcile inconsistencies and extract meaning. If it can’t, it’s proof of its (the audience’s) inadequacies, not the leader’s.

This dynamic is disturbingly familiar in Trump’s political orbit. The president rarely offers coherent strategic explanations for his actions. Instead, he issues fragmentary statements, contradictory remarks, or rhetorical flourishes. Supporters are left to assemble the pieces into a narrative of deeper intention.

This is not a communications failure. It is a style of governance.

The irony is that in this case, it obscures what is probably the soundest and most courageous policy decision so far.

A serious explanation of the Iran strikes could easily have been constructed. The administration could have articulated a doctrine of nuclear prevention, explained the intelligence assessments that triggered the operation, and outlined the strategic logic behind limited strikes rather than full-scale war. It could have situated the operation within a broader regional vision involving deterrence, alliances, and diplomatic pressure.

Instead, the public received contradictory goals and impractical slogans.

In the long term, democracies always win wars, in part because their major decisions are accompanied by clear public reasoning. Arguments allow citizens to evaluate policy, critics to challenge assumptions, and allies to understand intentions. Through deliberation and respect for expertise, better decision-making is achieved.

Even when leaders are right, refusing to explain themselves corrodes the norms that make democratic leadership possible – and effective.

Trump’s orbit compounds the problem. He has surrounded himself, more than most presidents, with loyalists who rarely challenge him publicly or privately. The resulting echo chamber reduces the likelihood that someone inside the administration will insist on the discipline of strategic communication. Cory Lewandowski’s imprecation, “let Trump be Trump,” may be good during an electoral campaign, but it is less so when managing and communicating a complex strategy.

In healthy administrations, like Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, internal dissent often forces clarity. Advisors demand answers to basic questions: What is the objective? What constitutes victory? What risks are acceptable? When those questions are asked internally, they often produce clearer explanations externally.

Without that process, policy may still succeed—but the success feels haphazard and tenuous.

This is why the war’s unpopularity feels oddly tragic.

Trump is doing something strategically sensible and politically courageous. Preventing the consolidation of Iranian nuclear capability while the opportunity exists is a defensible objective, one that previous administrations also struggled to achieve or, perhaps, bungled. He is using a unique – and short – window of opportunity in which that is achievable with relatively low cost in life and treasure.

But by refusing to articulate the reasoning, the administration has turned what could have been a moment of strategic clarity into another episode of political opacity.

The war is justified and salutary. The confusion around is not.

And that opacity reflects a broader problem in our politics: a growing belief that leadership requires neither persuasion nor explanation.

If that belief takes root, even good decisions will come at a cost.

Because in democracies, the legitimacy of power does not come only from being right.

It comes from making the case.