After the events of last October 7, most of us assumed—naively as it turned out—that the brutal massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis would trigger a great outpouring of sympathy and support for Israel. We also hoped it would lead to the definitive repudiation of the kind of hatred of Jews and Judaism that inspired Hamas’s terrible atrocities, and that before October 7 had culminated with the Holocaust.
We were wrong.
On the contrary, the reaction to October 7 entailed a frightening surge in anti-Semitism, especially from the political left. We were stunned and appalled to watch violence unleashed not just against Israel and supporters of Israel. There were actual physical attacks on Jews and Jewish students on America’s most prestigious campuses: according to Hillel International, over ten times as many anti-Semitic incidents took place on campuses between July and September 2024 than during the summer of 2023. This surge was accompanied by ostracism of anyone—no matter how liberal—the anti-Israel mob decided to label Zionist. In effect, any Jew who didn’t denounce Israel’s actions as “genocide” or justify the brutality of Israel’s enemies, including Hamas, became persona non grata on the left.
A year later is a good time to figure out what is going on.
In the piece I published in Mosaic a year ago, I warned that the October 7 attack on Israel was only part of a larger attack on the West and Western values. That view has become fairly standard among my fellow conservatives, if it wasn’t before. Now, it’s important to turn that perspective around and to recognize the inevitable: that systematic attacks on the West and Western values—expressed through critical Marxism, radical feminism, the transgender ideology, and the entire fabric of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—would eventually turn against Jews and Judaism. After all, this was true of anti-Western, illiberal ideologies of the past, including fascism, Nazism, and Communism. It is now true of their successors, from radical Islam to today’s radical “woke” left.
The key question is: why? I can offer several answers.
One should be obvious. The entire history of the Jews as a people, and their identification with their history, is immune from ideological revision and intellectual fashion. It’s a history that springs from a single world-shattering event, the Israelites’ covenant with God. Out of that covenant flows a nearly 4,000-year-old narrative built around obedience to a divine authority who transcends politics and nature. It’s a historical narrative organized around themes of personal responsibility and redemption, not class or race or gender.
It is this history that has set Jews apart from other communities for millennia, but it has also made them more resilient, because it is built on the proposition that God’s laws take precedence over the laws instituted by those with whom they live and work.
That which makes the Jews strong is precisely what drives others to fury and envy. How dare the Jews persist while we rise and fall? That is the burning question enemies of the Jews have asked themselves from the time of the Philistines, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans to the Nazis and the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. Now it includes a very angry and frustrated “woke” left.
What is particularly infuriating for them about Jewish history is that it has an overriding moral dimension, expressed through individual action both good and bad. If individuals or a nation suffer success or disaster, responsibility ultimately belongs to human beings, not class or race or gender or intersectionality. Good and evil exist; they are inescapable and crucial dimensions of each individual life, and they reveal the power and justice of God. There is no sidestepping moral decision making, no passage “beyond good and evil” for any of us.
Ultimately, accepting the validity of this perspective offers us a deep sense of freedom, but it’s a freedom that comes with a price: that of personal responsibility before the imperatives of God’s laws.
As it happens, the West is the great inheritor of that Jewish freedom and strength derived from the binding personal relationship with God and God’s laws. It has passed down first through Christianity, and then through the moral foundations of the modern state, including the notions of human rights and individual freedom that the left used to celebrate, and perhaps still does. But paradoxically, the entire thrust of our postmodern Western culture has been to neutralize and then deny that Judeo-Christian inheritance for the sake of a secular ideal based on political expediency and the universal power of self-interest.
Much of the West deliberately exalted this de-Christianized ideal in order to appear tolerant and open to other cultures and identities, including of course Islam. But it has come at a terrible price. By adopting what the French philosopher Pierre Manent has called a “radical secularism,” we have come to deny our own identities, Jew and non-Jew alike.
Which brings us back to October 7, and radical Islam.
The bitter truth is that the Islamists see through our disguise. They know what the West denies, i.e., that we are a Judeo-Christian civilization with deep religious and moral roots. Accepting that fact doesn’t necessarily mean confrontation, let alone unleashing a new spirit of “crusade” (the term from which both radical Islamists and liberals recoil in horror). On the contrary, taking pride in our Judeo-Christian inheritance would make it easier for Muslims and others to come to terms with its living presence in the West, both here in America and particularly in Europe, where the denial of that inheritance has sunk to the level of mass psychosis.
But doing this requires those of us who are non-Jews to acknowledge who we are, and our eternal debt to Judaism—which, paradoxically, the drama of the Holocaust served to obscure (except for evangelical Christians, who understand very well what Israel and the Jews represent for them and the rest of us). To put it slightly differently, just as we can’t and don’t expect Muslims to shed their core identity, we shouldn’t shed ours. The model for Muslims of how to adopt to the modern West should in fact be the Jews themselves, who live in freedom in our midst and recognize our laws without relinquishing who they are, or who they want to be.
In short, what may lie ahead is a new cultural synthesis that can grow up in the shadow of October 7, for Jews, Muslims, and the West alike. A synthesis in which we are all honest about who we are, perhaps for the first time.