The Diaspora Jews' Titanic
Why the old idea of safety is a mirage, and what to do about it
American Jewry's Titanic
The news in 1912 was full of the Titanic: a steamship where the second-class cabins were more opulent than the first-class cabins on other ships. This ship was billed as larger, more opulent, and safer than any other steamship. It was considered unsinkable.
On its first voyage it hit an iceberg and went down, taking 1500 lives.
Liberal Jews in America have a similar arrogance. Largely made up of Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews, many are graduates of elite colleges; most are white collar and professional workers. They consider themselves smarter, kinder, and better than the primitive, passe, obsolete, and archaic Orthodox. I know; I was raised in a typical liberal family. These negative words were used frequently in my Sunday school classes to describe traditional Jews.
Even at 10 years old I recognized the truth behind Queen Gertrude’s famous line from Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Yet Liberal Judaism’s unflagging belief in the righteousness of Hamas’s claims has them dancing as the Titanic begins to sink.
Disbelief in the Atrocities of October 7, 2023
Although Jews are only about 2% of the US population, Jewish students have made up around 25% of undergraduates at Ivy League schools, according to the Jerusalem Post.i Many top public colleges, such as the University of Michigan, also have had high numbers of Jewish students. In a study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication and quoted in Nature, "The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of 'elite' educational backgrounds." And as we have seen from campus uprisings and the responses of their leaderships, these universities and colleges have been overwhelmingly left-leaning.
The legacy media--traditional online, print and broadcast news sources such as the New York Times and CNN, as contrasted with new online sources such as Blaze Media and Daily Wire, have for many years been extremely liberal.
The pro-Hamas, liberal line has consistently been divided between "There was no massacre on October 7," and "Hamas defensively attacked Israel in response to years of genocide, and the videos of atrocities were generated by the Israelis to gain sympathy. The magnitude of the attacks was greatly exaggerated."
Interestingly, when I asked Copilot AI to find me these reports so I could document what I remembered, I got a message that an AI overview was not available. Almost immediately Google shut down, I was closed out of Copilot and blocked from Microsoft for 24 hours.
Troubling Events
According to a Tel Aviv University study by Derek Lief and others, there were nearly 3900 demonstrations regarding the war within its first month. Of those, 69% supported Hamas and only 31% supported Israel. Many call for the killing of Jews and damage to Jewish communities around the world, as well as the destruction of Israel.
One has only to look at video coverage of riots in the USA, beginning with the George Floyd riots of 2020, to see the propensity for intense violence by young Americans. Reports of incitement of violence against Jews in many Muslim mosques in the USA, documented as long ago as 2017, also exist, although finding evidence on the Internet may be difficult. Many of my American friends heard of the riots only through my Facebook page as the American legacy media did not give them much, if any, coverage. This suggests that many liberal American Jews are not aware of the magnitude of violence of today's mobs.
The Israeli news in November 2024 included reports of destruction of Jewish property in the USA and around the world on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. That night in 1938, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed by mobs across Germany in what was clearly an orchestrated event. Many consider this event the beginning of the Holocaust.
The destruction of Jewish property on Kristallnacht’s anniversary should be very troubling. Hamas is clearly aware of this date, as it is of the significance of Jewish holy days and, now, not only October 7 but also the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. In 2023, October 7 fell on Simchat Torah. In 2025, the holiday falls on Tuesday, October 14 in Israel and Wednesday, October 15, outside.
Another troubling fact is that although since Oct. 7 more Jews than ever have been buying guns, there is still a relatively low percentage of Jews owning guns and who might actually be able to use them against other people. This means that most Jews and Jewish communities must depend on the police to protect them. More about this later.
The combination of these factors is, to me, frightening.
Islamic Terrorism Outside of Israel
Before I retired in the USA I taught adult immigrants English. Students from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, Montenegro, Greece, Albania, and southern India told me they had fled their homelands because of Islamic terror. This was confirmed (if numerous first-person accounts--empirical evidence--do not count) in many places.ii I was told that in their communities, non-Muslim children were often killed by hit-run drivers on quiet streets on good-weather days--"accidents" that could not have been accidental. When families converted to Islam, their children were safe.
Independent news sources report on Islamic massacres of Christians throughout Africa and Asia. All the reports sound like what happened near Gaza on October 7, 2023: hordes of masked men flood villages and brutally rape and massacre men, women and children. According to Open Doors, a Christian organization supporting coreligionists who are persecuted for their faith, 2024 saw almost 5,000 Christians killed in faith-related attacks, with the likelihood of many additional unreported deaths. Between 2023 and 2024, attacks on Christian homes rose 371 percent to 21,431. These reports do not make the front pages of legacy newspapers; if covered at all, the reports are brief accounts on inside pages.
The Current Danger
Believing the legacy media's lies about Israel, especially that the Hamas massacres were engineered or greatly exaggerated by Israel, and the fact that it ignores Islamic terrorism in the rest of the world, is setting up American Jewry for disaster.
Many American Jews remain confident that they have nothing to fear, despite huge ongoing rallies at which calls for the destruction of Israel and death to Jews are prominent. They apparently have confidence in the morality and righteousness of their Muslim neighbors and in their local police departments. However, police departments across the USA have been reluctant to call anti-Jewish violence "terrorism," or even "hate crimes," although this may be slowly changing.
As a result, many liberals do not take the threat of Muslim extremists seriously. At the least, they have believed that while Zionists may be targeted, they will remain safe. Adina Vogel Ayalon, a spokeswoman for J Street, one of the leftist groups that pretend to support Israel but are actually far-left, anti-Israel groups, made this very clear in a comment reported by the BBC. "These types of hate crimes are not distinguishing between where you fall on the political spectrum about the war...and that is something very unsettling,"iii she is reported to have said.
The far-left bent of US courts provide cover for leftist violence. Symptomatic of this is the recent case of a Maryland judge's sentence of a man who, unprovoked, brutally beat two elderly people who were merely praying near an abortion clinic.iv One of the victims was treated for three fractures, blindness in one eye, and other injuries. Prosecutors requested 10 years in prison, but the judge, Yvette M. Bryant,v gave the perpetrator one year of home detention, which gives him freedom to live with his family and travel for work and medical care. While the case has nothing to do with Jews or Islam, it demonstrates that some US courts are incredibly biased against those with whom the leftist judge disagrees.
The Probable Result
Major, coordinated attacks against Jews and Jewish communities are almost certainly coming to the USA.
I believe it is highly likely, unless the US government applies draconian measures against the frequent demonstrations, their leaders, funders, and participants, that an October 7-type massacre will occur within the next year or two in the USA. The incredible atrocities of October 7 might not occur because Americans involved in the riots have not yet been desensitized to the extremes of violence. But even so, I can envision mobs of young, masked rioters causing untold destruction and even death in Jewish neighborhoods across the USA, and probably the world, in an orchestrated day or evening of violence. Social media makes this kind of orchestration easy and common, and it has been practiced successfully against Christian and other minority groups around the world.
Even without a lack of will to prosecute the enemies of Israel, American police forces will be handicapped. Funding in many areas has been cut since the Defund the Police movement. Many experienced officers have left the field, and DEI-appointed police chiefs who sympathize with "the oppressed" have created weak forces unequipped to handle riots in general and terrorism or antisemitism in particular. This situation has been made worse by the strident lies about the prevalence of police brutality and the way liberal judges and juries have handled cases between police and violent offenders, especially when those offenders fall into the DEI category of "oppressors."vi
The Solution
I call on American Jews to do four things.
First, leave religious congregations whose rabbis do not support, and preach support for, Israel and Zionists. Start your own minyanim (prayer groups) meeting in homes; this is a well-known and accepted practice.
Second, leave Progressivism and the Democrat Party. They have abandoned you; stop supporting them.
Third, band together to take political action against all governmental leaders, no matter how much support you gave them in the past, who do not support Israel and Zionists. This support needs to be across the board, not nuanced, that is, not "depending on the context." If there ever was a time for nuance, it has passed.
Fourth, make aliyah--move to Israel. My next essay for adults, to be published Sept. 10, will expand on aliyah.
We in Israel protect our own--at home. But we cannot protect you in the USA. This, you must do yourselves. And first, you need to accept that the philosophy you supported with your money, your votes, your emotions and your thoughts has deserted you. The leaders of Progressive movements such as DEI and feminism have not only abandoned Jewish expressions of progressivism but have taken active roles in fomenting anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism. Continuing to support them because of the past is foolishness at best and dangerous, possibly fatal, if carried to its logical conclusion.
Judaism teaches that all of us--religious and not, Jewish and not, are made in the image of God, and that alone gives us each value. Recognize that the values proclaimed--but no longer (if they ever were) lived up to--by the Left and Progressives come directly from the Jewish moral code. You can maintain most of the values you have always upheld, such as support for the poor, orphans, and widows; for the environment; and for life. Peruse past essays from this blog, where I have addressed many of these issues from a traditional Jewish viewpoint.
Progressivism has sold not only Israel and Zionists, but every-day Jews, down the river, but the basic values on which that philosophy purports to have been built are eternal. It is entirely possible to support traditional expressions of these values without practicing traditional Judaism.
Come home to the traditional Jewish view of morality. And come home to Israel.
i Friedman, G., The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 18, 2015, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/the-most-heavily-jewish-us-college-and-other-facts-about-jews-at-american-colleges-437701
ii Just one example: https://zenit.org/2025/01/18/the-50-countries-that-persecute-christians-the-most-today-and-the-role-of-communism-and-islamism/
iii https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9915k219r8o
iv https://www.dailywire.com/news/man-who-brutally-beat-elderly-pro-lifers-dodges-prison-time?author=Leif+Le+Mahieu&category=undefined&elementPosition=27&row=3&rowHeadline=Latest+News&rowType=Vertical+Carousel&title=Man+Who+Brutally+Beat+Elderly+Pro-Lifers+D
v https://omny.fm/shows/the-daily-controversy/outrageous-injustice-marxist-judge-yvette-m-bryant-slaps-thug-with-home-detention-for-brutally-assaulting-elderly-pro-life-heroes-proving-democrats-war-on-pro-life-americans-8-8-25
vihttps://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/dei-and-why-it-is-a-problem