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Here’s how Jewish life changed (for now) after Oct. 7
(JTA) — “Everything changed after Oct. 7.” It’s an axiom being heard around Shabbat tables, in rabbis’ sermons and in countless opinion pieces after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel plunged the country into war. At an emotional level, it refers to the despair and shock felt among people in mourning – for the 1,200 victims of the initial attack, for the soldiers lost in battle and perhaps for a vision of Israel as a country that could at least “manage” its conflict with the Palestinians and continue to flourish.
But for many observers, it refers to a series of ruptures in Jewish life whose effects are only just beginning to be felt. They include seismic shifts in their relationship to Israel, how they form political alliances and their way of being Jewish in a world that feels scarier, lonelier and, in some surprising ways, more Jewish than ever.
Below are some of the major themes of change, culled from the writings of analysts, activists, rabbis and pundits. Because it has only been two months since the war began, some of their insights and predictions are provisional and perhaps premature. Some contradict each other. But together they capture a moment when old assumptions appeared to have died in the kibbutzim, villages and fields of the “Gaza envelope,” and new ones are taking their place.
“We are alone”
In the days immediately after the Hamas attacks, President Joe Biden pledged America’s support for Israel and its right to defend itself and root out Hamas. That promise has mostly held, even as the deaths of as many as 15,000 Palestinians has caused growing unease among some in his administration, and within factions of the Democratic Party.
Yet the backing of superpower didn’t alleviate a sense of betrayal for many Israelis and their supporters in the west.
“In my conversations with college students, rabbis, business leaders, Jewish professionals, and others, the sentence that everyone seems to circle around, spoken or unspoken, is ‘We are alone,’” wrote Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist, in an Oct. 10 column for Sapir, the Jewish thought journal he edits. “That’s despite clarion statements of solidarity from President Biden, Republican leaders in Congress, prominent TV anchors, and millions of ordinary Americans. Because beneath that, we sense that something is badly amiss,” including inadequate statements from university leaders and the support for Hamas among college students and the left.
The historian Sara Yael Hirschhorn also predicted that by the time the war ends, “Israel will have lost the war for world opinion. What happens on college campuses, media desks, or street protests won’t stay there — it has already eroded support for Israel within the Democratic Party, the US State Department is in revolt, the military brass are frightened of a regional war, while the chattering class [is] demanding absolute condemnation of Israel. Most Western governments are watching restive populations marching through their streets (occasionally stopping to smash glass and beat Jews on the street in a 21st century Kristallnacht) while its legislators choose their jobs over moral clarity and their representatives can’t even pass UN resolutions that use the words ‘Hamas,’ ‘Israel’ or ‘hostages.’”
Betrayal by the left
Numerous liberal Jewish activists have written about being “abandoned” by social justice allies who embraced the Hamas narrative or saw Israel as solely responsible for the attacks and criminally culpable for its response. As Gal Beckerman wrote in The Atlantic, “many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian — templates made of concrete.”
Haviva Ner-David, an Israeli-American peace living in northern Israel, wrote in a JTA essay that “the hailing of that massacre by much of the world, including the progressive (even Jewish) left … triggered a deep fear for our survival as Jews.” Watching pro-Palestinian protests by progressives, she saw “activists crossing a line from struggling for peace and Palestinian rights into promoting a hateful, terrifying, dangerous anti-Jewish agenda.”
Orthodox Jewish feminist Daphne Lazar Price wrote in JTA that she was shocked by putative feminist allies who refused to show outrage over Hamas’ sexual crimes against Israeli women on Oct. 7.
“I can’t continue to work with those who don’t see me in the same light, as someone deserving of love and respect, no matter how they feel about my Judaism or Israel,” she writes. “My attempts to engage former colleagues have been hurtful and fruitless because of their unwillingness derived from ideological differences or a defensiveness of long-held views. Those groups’ attempted mind games to decide who is worthy of care and who is entitled to protections need to end — or they will become irrelevant.”
A realignment among liberals
This fracture in the left has also led to predictions that the liberal American Jewish majority will modify its embrace of aspects of the social justice agenda it has traditionally supported.
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, writes that for some liberal Jews, a re-engagement with their Jewish selves “may reflect a real existential transformation away from those exact liberal values and commitments they held dear for a long time. It is something of a replay of the prior generation’s anti-Communist turn in the 1960s and 1970s, a journey inward from the universal to the particular.”
Stephens had his doubts: “My guess is that a few will make a clean break, like the brave ex-Communists of ‘The God That Failed,’ who made public their disillusionment with the Soviet Union in the famous 1949 book of that name,” he writes in the same Sapir essay. “Most others will use the pretext of Israel’s retaliation to return to their delusional sleep. People who adopt the politics of the extreme tend to double down: Rationalizations and moral equivalences come easy, and notoriety is easier than contrition.”
An embrace of the right
While some Jewish liberals complained of abandonment, others worried about Jews and Israelis embracing a hawkish, militaristic response to the Hamas attacks that makes no room for disagreement, dissent or eventual compromise. “This is leaving those of us who are committed to shared spaces, shared resistance, and a shared future grounded in equality very much alone,” writes Haggai Matar, in the leftist Israeli magazine +972. “It is, in many ways, a condensed microcosm of the rifts that have emerged within the left globally over the past month as well.”
In an essay for The Cut, a left-leaning American Orthodox Jew identified as “R.B.” writes that in their community, “Everyone is a haunted mess, and jingoism appears to be the defense mechanism of choice.”
“It is painful to watch people around me whom I have known for their inquiring minds and strong sense of morality become uncritical flag-wavers, watch them dismiss massacres as disinformation, watch them advocate more and more violence. They treat cease-fire as a dirty word,” writes R.B.
In Jewish Currents, the left-wing journal, Raz Segal criticized fellow Holocaust and genocide scholars in Israel, North America and beyond for signing a statement condemning Hamas terror and denouncing the rise of global antisemitism that he said “completely dehumanized Palestinians and made no mention whatsoever of any form of Israeli mass violence.”
The (further) poisoning of the discourse
Social media has become a toxic battleground in the war of ideas — “Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech has surged across the internet since the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 15. Rarely a safe space for enlightened discourse, the vitriol on X and Instagram since Oct. 7 has forced many longtime users to weigh the necessity of engaging on social media against their mental wellbeing.
Lior Zaltzman, the deputy managing editor of Kveller, has worked in Jewish social media since 2014, and writes that “I’ve also never seen it this awful, this polarizing, this … honestly, unhinged.”
She adds: “People are so stuck in their ‘side’ and binary that they’re willing to share anything — without fact-checking, without making sure they’re not getting in bed with people whose worldview is dangerous, without asking themselves for a small second, wait, is this Islamophobic? Antisemitic? Completely detached from reality? Wondering if they sound like a conspiracy theorist, or if they’re just being cruel for cruelty’s sake?”
Reengaging as Jews
Kurtzer and others also see Jews reclaiming a sense of Jewish belonging — or having that sense of belonging forced upon them. Prior to Oct. 7, the perennial concern among the Jewish mainstream was that the politically and religiously liberal majority of American Jews “was at risk of exiting from the Jewish community,” he writes. “Now I see signs of reengagement, reflected in higher turnout at synagogue, Hillel and Chabad events, and expressed on social media as a response to a sense of alienation from a gentile world that does not take Jewish pain and trauma seriously. This is happening at all ages.”
Boutique store owner Susan Korn and jewelry designer Stephanie Gottlieb both told the New York Times that sales of Star of David necklaces spiked after Oct. 7. In November, a Chabad poll found that the vast majority of of its U.S. emissaries were reporting increased attendance at their events.
Steven Windmueller, who researches Jewish communal trends, sees signs of both retreat and engagement. “[W]e wonder about our status, even our safety,” he wrote in the Jewish Exponent. “Some of us are withdrawing from public Jewish places, uncomfortable being in those spaces where Jews gather. Others are removing the physical symbols of Jewishness, both personal and communal.
“At the same time, for instance, at the grade-school level, we are seeing a transformational moment. Now we have reports of parents moving kids from public educational settings into Jewish parochial schools.”
Solidarity around an Israel at war
In the year leading up to the war, Israel was torn apart over the government’s plan to overhaul its judicial system and, its critics said, undermine its democracy. The weekly mass protests were taken up by Jews in New York and beyond. The era of street protests ended on Oct. 7. “The judicial reform and protests of the past year had led many Israelis to start asking whether the country even had a future,” David Hazony, the Israeli-American writer and editor wrote on Nov. 1. “In the last three weeks, however, Israelis have come together with a strength and focus far beyond what anyone thought possible. When a true crisis came, politics fell away and the nation united.” One of the groups organizing the North American protests, UnXeptable, changed its motto from “Saving Israeli Democracy” to “Saving Israel.”
That solidarity is also being seen in the Diaspora, perhaps most notably at a pro-Israel rally in Washington that drew an estimated 290,000 people. Federations are seeing a surge in donations, groups are planning solidarity trips to Israel both to volunteer where needed and to bear witness, and even the North American haredi Orthodox sector — many of whose leaders and followers keep an arm’s distance from the secular Jewish state as a matter of theology — are demonstrating what JTA called an “outpouring of support for Israel and its military at a level not seen in decades.”
Rabba Sarah Hurwitz, president of the feminist Orthodox yeshivah Maharat, says that kind of solidarity offers a glimmer of a brighter future.
“This is what we do. In times of tragedy, we rally,” she writes. We find ways to support one another with comfort, food and supplies. These acts of chesed, kindness, cannot undo the tragic loss of life. They cannot bring home the hundreds who are held hostage. They cannot heal the thousands of wounded. But digging into our humanity reminds us that there is light in darkness….
“Then, because we don’t have a choice, we will get back to the work of learning, teaching, and serving. It’s the Jewish way.”
—
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ADL Research: 24% of Americans Believe Recent Violence Against Jews Is ‘Understandable’
Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim who were shot and killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, pose for a picture at an unknown location, in this handout image released by Embassy of Israel to the US on May 22, 2025. Photo: Embassy of Israel to the USA via X/Handout via REUTERS
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report on Friday revealing American attitudes about antisemitic violence following the targeted attacks earlier this year against Jews in Boulder, Colo., Harrisburg, Pa., and Washington, D.C. The watchdog group found a sizable minority (24 percent) found the attacks “understandable” while 13 percent regarded them as “justified.”
The ADL surveyed a representative sample of 1000 Americans on Thursday, ensuring the group matched accurate proportions of the country’s demography. The findings showed disparate views across age groups and partisan affiliations while also a clear, majority consensus on many questions.
The survey showed that 87 percent of respondents believed the three recent antisemitic attacks to be unjustifiable while 85 percent called them morally wrong and 77 percent assessed them as antisemitic. Eighty-six percent regarded the violence against Jews as hate crimes. However, nearly a quarter of respondents said the attacks were “understandable.”
More Republicans (15 percent) than Democrats (11 percent) regarded the attacks as justified, while more Republicans (79 percent) than Democrats (77 percent) saw the attacks as antisemitic. Partisan differences also manifested in support for increased government action against antisemitism with 74 percent of Republicans in favor compared to 81 percent of Democrats.
In presenting their research findings, the ADL emphasized the broad agreement in American opposition to antisemitic violence and conspiracist tropes before noting the presence of a distinct minority of “millions of people who excuse or endorse violence against Jews—an alarming sign of how anti-Jewish narratives are spreading.” For example, 67 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans agree that antisemitism is a serious problem.
Smaller numbers among the Democrats (25 percent) and Republicans (23 percent) will acknowledge antisemitism as a concern in their own party. The ADL poll suggests the legitimacy of such suspicions, finding that “28 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats agreed with tropes such as Jews have too much influence in politics and media.”
Partisan affiliations correlated with where respondents saw the most significant antisemitic threats. Republicans expressed a 3.6 times greater likelihood of worries about left-wing antisemitism compared to Democrats who were 4.4 times as likely to focus on right-wing antisemitism.
The pollsters found that attitudes toward the severity of the antisemitic threat differed according to age.
While 80 percent of silent generation respondents saw antisemitism as a serious problem, that number fell to 65 percent for baby boomers and members of Generation X. The rates dropped again for millennials (52 percent) and Gen-Zers (55 percent).
Perceptions of antisemitism in local communities also differed by generation. While 19 percent of Americans overall report having witnessed antisemitism in their communities, that figure jumps to 33 percent for Gen-Zers and 20 percent for millennials. Among the boomers it drops to 10 percent and for Silent Generation respondents it reaches 17 percent.
Large numbers saw the threat of popular protest slogans “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” with 68 percent seeing the phrases as potentially fueling violence, a view held even among 54 percent of those who favor protests against Israel.
Researchers also observed a correlation between Israel support and perceiving the seriousness of antisemitism in America. While 74 percent of those favorable to Israel saw domestic antisemitism as significant, only 57 percent of those with negative views of the Jewish state agreed.
Nearly a quarter of those polled—24 percent—expressed the conspiratorial view that some group had staged the attacks to provoke sympathy for Israel. A second report also released by the ADL on Friday showed the rise in discussions of “false flag” attacks on the Reddit website in response to the antisemitic violence.
The ADL warned that “these beliefs are especially dangerous because they justify holding Jewish Americans responsible for the actions of the State of Israel, effectively viewing them as collectively responsible for international politics—making them greater targets.”
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Sen. Bernie Sanders Calls on Democrats to Stop Accepting Money From AIPAC
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), took to X/Twitter on Monday to call on all Democrats to stop accepting political donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential pro‑Israel lobbying entity.
In his tweet, Sanders wrote that AIPAC has aided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in waging an “illegal and immoral war being waged against the Palestinian people.” Sanders continued, claiming that “NO Democrat should accept money from AIPAC” while asserting that the organization helped “deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.”
Sanders’s post came in response to comments by former Obama administration foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, in which Rhodes urged Democrats to reject all future donations from AIPAC. Rhodes argued that AIPAC has influenced Democrats to take immoral stances on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that has delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, and you cannot give them a carve out,” Rhodes said on an episode of the podcast Pod Save the World. “We need to have this fight as a party, because these are the wrong people to have under your tent.”
Tommy Vietor, another former Obama administration official and podcast co-host, agreed, accusing AIPAC of “funneling money to front organizations that primary progressive Democrats.”
AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying firm in the US, has historically backed pro-Israel candidates from both parties. The organization does not specifically lobby against progressive candidates. AIPAC has aided the campaigns of pro-Israel progressives such as Ritchie Torres.
Sanders has long held an acrimonious relationship with AIPAC. In November 2023, he repudiated the group for supposedly having”supported dozens of GOP extremists who are undermining our democracy,” and urged his fellow Democrats to stand together in the fight for a world of peace, economic and social justice and climate sanity.”
Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under President Obama, has emerged as a vocal critic of Israeli policy, particularly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His skepticism is rooted in years of diplomatic frustration during the Obama administration, especially surrounding failed peace negotiations and Israel’s settlement expansions in the West Bank. Rhodes has often framed Israel’s hardline stance as a major obstacle to a two-state solution, and he has been critical of what he sees as unconditional U.S. support that enables right-wing Israeli policies. His stance reflects a broader shift among some American progressives who advocate for a more balanced U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sanders has long been a staunch critic of the Jewish state. Sanders has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “collective punishment” and “apartheid” against the Palestinian people. Although the senator initially condemned the Oct. 7 slaughters of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel by Hamas, he subsequently pushed for a “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group. Sanders also spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to implement a partial arms embargo on Israel in 2024.
In the 20 months following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, relations between the Democratic party and the Jewish state have deteriorated. Democratic lawmakers have grown more vocally critical of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, sometimes arguing that the Jewish state has recklessly endangered lives of Palestinian civilians. Moreover, polls indicate that Democratic voters have largely turned against Israel, intensifying pressure on liberal lawmakers to shift their tone regarding the war in Gaza.
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Iranian National Charged in Plot to Subvert US Sanctions Against Islamic Republic
Iranians participating in a memorial ceremony for IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists in downtown Tehran, Iran, on July 2, 2025. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl via Reuters Connect.
Federal law enforcement officials have arrested an Iranian national after uncovering his alleged conspiracy to export US technology to Tehran in violation of a slew of economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday.
For May 2018 to July 2025, Bahram Mohammad Ostovari, 66, allegedly amassed “railway signaling and telecommunications systems” for transport to the Iranian government by using “two front companies” located in the United Arab Emirates. After filing fake orders for them with US vendors at Ostovari’s direction, the companies shipped the materials — which included “sophisticated computer processors” — to Tehran, having duped the US businesses into believing that they “were the end users.”
The Justice Department continued, “After he became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in May 2020, Ostovari continued to export, sell, and supply electronics and electrical components to [his company] in Iran,” noting that the technology became components of infrastructure projects commissioned by the Islamic Republic.
Ostovari has been charged with four criminal counts for allegedly violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (ITSR), under which conducting business with Iran is proscribed due to the country’s human rights abuses, material support for terrorism, and efforts to build a larger-scale nuclear program in violation of international non-proliferation obligations. Each count carries a 20-year maximum sentence in federal prison.
Ostovari is one of several Iranian nationals to become the subject of criminal proceedings involving crimes against the US this year.
In April, a resident of Great Falls, Virginia — Abouzar Rahmati, 42 — pleaded guilty to collecting intelligence on US infrastructure and providing it to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“From at least December 2017 through June 2024, Rahmati worked with Iranian government officials and intelligence operatives to act on their behalf in the United States, including by meeting with Iranian intelligence officers and government officials using a cover story to hide his conduct,” the Justice Department said at the time, noting that Rahmati even infiltrated a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that possesses “sensitive non-public information about the US aviation sector.”
Throughout the duration of his cover, Rahmati amassed “open-source and non-public materials about the US solar energy industry,” which he delivered to “Iranian intelligence officers.”
The government found that the operation began in August 2017, after Rahmati “offered his services” to a high-ranking Iranian government official who had once been employed by the country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, according to the Justice Department. Months later, he traveled to Iran, where Iranian agents assigned to him the espionage activity to which he pleaded guilty to perpetrating.
“Rahmati sent additional material relating to solar energy, solar panels, the FAA, US airports, and US air traffic control towers to his brother, who lived in Iran, so that he would provide those files to Iranian intelligence on Rahmati’s behalf,” the Justice Department continued. Rahmati also, it said, delivered 172 gigabytes worth of information related to the National Aerospace System (NAS) — which monitors US airspace, ensuring its safety for aircraft — and NAS Airport Surveillance to Iran during a trip he took there.
Rahmati faces up to 10 years in prison. He will be sentenced in August.
In November, three Iranian intelligence assets were charged with contriving a conspiracy to assassinate critics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as then US President-elect Donald Trump.
According to the Justice Department, Farhad Shakeri, 51; Carlisle Rivera, 49; and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, acted at the direction of and with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, to plot to murder a US citizen of Iranian origin in New York. Shakeri, who remains at large and is believed to reside in Iran, was allegedly the principal agent who managed the two other men, both residents of New York City who appeared in court.
Their broader purpose, prosecutors said, was to target nationals of the United States and its allies for attacks, including “assaults, kidnapping, and murder, both to repress and silence critical dissidents” and to exact revenge for the 2020 killing of then-IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq. Trump was president of the US at the time of the operation.
All three men are now charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy, and money laundering. Shakeri faces additional charges, including violating sanctions against Iran, providing support to a terrorist organization, and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Powers Act, offenses for which he could serve up to six decades in federal prison.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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