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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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University of Nebraska Considers BDS Resolution Pushed by Anti-Israel Group
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) participating in a “Liberated Zone” encampment at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in November 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) student government was scheduled to vote Wednesday on a resolution calling on the institution to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
According to The Daily Nebraskan, the UNL Association of Students (ASUN) introduced the measure at the request of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group which analysts have cited as being an outsized factor in the campus antisemitism crisis which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The resolution, “Senate Bill 14,” aims to undermine Israeli national security by demanding divestment from armaments manufacturers, describing the measure as an effort to block “weapons complicit in the genocide and atrocities worldwide.”
Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
UNL’s SJP chapter has praised Hamas terrorists as “our martyrs,” promoted atrocity propaganda which misrepresented Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas, accused Israel of targeting “Palestinian Christians,” and distributed falsehoods denying Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel. Since the Oct. 7 attack, the group has denounced UNL’s alleged ties to Israel, which includes a partnership in agricultural research, as investments in “death” even as it accuses the institution of Islamophobia.
The UNL student government’s agreeing to introduce the BDS resolution marks a major achievement for SJP, as the body has previously blocked the group’s attempts to promote its agenda through the campus legislative process. The decision to put it up for a vote is being widely criticized by political candidates, as well as lawmakers and officials in the federal government participating in a concerted effort to combat campus antisemitism.
“Antisemitism has NO place on college campuses,” Leo Terrell, chairman of the US Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, wrote on the X social media platform. “I’m calling on the Association of Students…to VOTE NO on the antisemitic BDS resolution pushed by SJP, a group that has celebrated attacks by terrorist organizations and is now targeting AMERICAN companies through its BDS campaign. The university, including UNL President Jeffrey P. Gold, must publicly reject this hateful agenda.”
US Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) lambasted the school’s decision even to consider the resolution.
“The BDS movement and Students for Justice in Palestine are fueling antisemitism on college campuses,” he said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner. “Endorsing this movement would make UNL less safe for Jewish students. We will not normalize antisemitism in Nebraska. I encourage UNL students to stand up for our Jewish neighbors and reject antisemitism.”
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, joined the chorus of voices calling for the resolution’s defeat, saying on X that he joined Terrell in “condemning this move by the radical Students for Justice in Palestine to pass a resolution to boycott and divest from Israel, our closest ally.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, the national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an SJP spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In October, SJP called for executing Muslim “collaborators” working with Israel in retaliation for the death of Palestinian influencer Saleh Al-Jafarawi during a brewing conflict between the Hamas terrorist group and a rival clan, Doghmush.
“In the face of hundreds of thousands of martyred Palestinians these past two years alone, collaborators and informants maintain their spineless disposition as objects of Zionist influence against their own people,” the group said in a statement posted on social media, continuing on to volley a series of unfounded charges alleging that anti-Hamas forces are “exploiting Gaza’s youth for money” and pilfering “desperately needed aid to the killing of their own people in service of Zionism.”
SJP concluded, “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Orthodox Jewish Man Attacked in Switzerland as Surge in Antisemitism Prompts Authorities to Boost Security
A pro-Hamas demonstration in Zurich, Switzerland, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: IMAGO/dieBildmanufaktur via Reuters Connect
An Orthodox Jewish man was physically assaulted in Zurich on Monday in the latest outrage of a surging wave of antisemitic incidents across Switzerland, sparking outcry within the Jewish community as authorities moved to bolster protections for Jews and Israelis nationwide.
According to local media, a 26-year-old Jewish man was brutally attacked late Monday night in northern Switzerland by an unknown individual, sustaining light injuries, including scratches and abrasions to his neck and other parts of his body.
Zurich police reported that the attack occurred without any provocation while the victim was standing in the street, with the assailant repeatedly punching him and shouting antisemitic slurs.
“The attack was not random, but specifically targeted at a Jewish individual,” local authorities said in a statement.
Before police arrived, bystanders intervened to help the victim, restraining the suspect, who continued hurling antisemitic slurs even after officers reached the scene.
The assailant, a 40-year-old Kosovo resident with no fixed address in Switzerland and a prior record for unrelated offenses, was arrested at the scene and transferred to the Zurich public prosecutor’s office following an initial police interrogation.
The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) strongly condemned the attack, urging authorities to step up protections for Jewish communities amid a surge of relentless antisemitism in the country.
“This incident is part of a series of antisemitic attacks that have increased sharply in Switzerland since October 2023,” SIG wrote in a post on X, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Jewish people have become targets of insults and physical violence simply because of their appearance and their Jewish identity,” the statement read.
The Foundation Against Racism and Antisemitism (GRA) also denounced the incident, warning of the alarming rise of hatred and the increasing normalization of antisemitism in society.
“Antisemitic narratives are becoming increasingly commonplace in some sections of society,” GRA wrote in a statement. “They are relativized and trivialized in political debates, on social media, and in everyday life.”
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) joined the local Jewish community in condemning the attack, emphasizing the urgent need to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish communities across the continent.
“No one should be attacked, insulted, or made to feel unsafe simply because of their Jewish identity,” EJC said in a post on X.
We are deeply concerned by the antisemitic assault against a young Orthodox Jew in Zurich.
No one should be attacked, insulted or made to feel unsafe simply because of their Jewish identity.
As the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities – @SIGFSCI rightly stated, this incident… pic.twitter.com/ONAtOYbwLO
— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) February 4, 2026
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Switzerland has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities.
According to EJC, 23 antisemitic incidents have recently been reported in Zurich schools, ranging from antisemitic remarks in public spaces and far-right symbols like swastikas carved into desks to direct provocations, threats, and assaults on students.
In 2024, Switzerland recorded 221 “real-world,” or non-online, antisemitic incidents, including an attempted arson attack at a Zurich synagogue and a stabbing in which a 15-year-old Swiss teenager seriously injured an Orthodox Jew, claiming the attack on behalf of the Islamic State.
As part of a broader initiative to strengthen security for Jewish institutions, Zurich’s city parliament last month decided to double funding for the protection of synagogues and other Jewish sites, increasing it from $1.3 million to $2.6 million.
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When Society’s Good Intentions for Jews Replace Equal Citizenship
An empty classroom. Photo: Wiki Commons.
A secular Manhattan school responded to October 7 by holding a Shabbat gathering. The head of school spoke with moral seriousness. Jewish families felt seen. Non-Jewish families showed up in solidarity. By any reasonable measure, this is a success story.
And that is precisely what makes it worth examining.
A Jerusalem Post report describes Town School’s response as sincere, generous, and embraced by the entire community. It is all of those things. But it also reflects a logic that deserves scrutiny — not because the intent is bad, but because the structure is fragile. What Town School offers is care. What it cannot offer is civic security. The difference matters more than most people realize.
The question is not whether warmth is preferable to hostility. It is whether a framework built on institutional affirmation can ever produce durable belonging — or whether it quietly substitutes recognition for citizenship, comfort for equality, and goodwill for rights.
The American alternative has a founding text. In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” As I have written elsewhere, this was not ceremony. It was a covenant.
Belonging depended on conduct, not creed. Citizenship was the baseline. Recognition was irrelevant.
Call this the Washington model: belonging is presumed, not conferred. The government does not identify groups, affirm them, or protect them through recognition. It simply refuses to make identity the basis of civic standing.
The affirmation model works differently. Jewish belonging is validated by institutions. Jewish life is welcomed through programming. Jewish safety flows from administrative judgment. This is the logic of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It feels compassionate. It is also a departure from the civic architecture that made America uniquely stable for Jews.
American Jews did not flourish because institutions learned to include them. They flourished because the regime limited the authority of institutions to decide who belonged at all. Jews attended public schools, served in the military, and entered professions — not because administrators welcomed them, but because the law made no provision for excluding them. That is pluralism as structure, not performance.
DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — inverts this. It treats belonging as something institutions must actively produce. Once belonging is conferred, it becomes conditional and, therefore, unstable.
None of this denies that schools should protect Jewish students in moments of fear, address antisemitism, enforce rules, and help manage difference. Care matters. Moral clarity matters. But short-term care does not require long-term structural dependency. The question is whether the framework makes Jewish belonging more secure over time or more fragile.
Critics of DEI often focus on excesses — ideological trainings, bureaucratic bloat, activist capture. They miss the point. The problem is not tone. It is structure. DEI replaces equal citizenship with managed identity. It reduces civic standing to recognition, safety to visibility, equality to representation. It grants institutions precisely the authority that liberal pluralism once denied them.
For Jews, this is perilous. Judaism is not simply cultural identity. It is a peoplehood and faith defined by continuity, obligation, and collective memory. America worked for Jews because the regime did not require Judaism to be translated into something thinner in order to belong.
DEI struggles with this. Jewish identity gets reframed as culture — ritual without peoplehood, heritage without permanence, symbolism without sovereignty. That version of Jewishness is easy to affirm because it makes no claims. But that ease is the warning sign.
This is not only imposed from outside. Jews have often been among the architects of DEI frameworks, usually with the best intentions. The same communal instinct that built hospitals, schools, and social agencies now sometimes builds systems that make Jewish belonging contingent rather than secure. Good faith does not neutralize structural risk.
Jews are not uniquely burdened by DEI, but they are diagnostically revealing. Any system that cannot accommodate a people simultaneously religious, ethnic, historical, and transnational will fracture under pressure from other complex identities. Jews expose the structural weakness. They are not the cause of it.
Feeling welcomed and being secure are not the same thing. Inclusion produces comfort. Citizenship produces stability. Belonging grounded in recognition depends on continued moral approval. Belonging grounded in citizenship does not. The former fluctuates with ideology; the latter endures through disagreement.
The educators at Town School appear to be acting in good faith. But no minority should rely on the personal virtue of administrators for its security. Sincerity is not a system. Good intentions do not correct for flawed design.
If Jewish security comes to depend on institutional affirmation rather than civic equality, Jews will be less secure, not more. And if this model becomes dominant, it will erode pluralism for everyone. No minority should want its standing to depend on recognition. No society should delegate belonging to administrators. No liberal order survives when citizenship is replaced by curation.
Institutions turn to DEI not out of malice but out of lost confidence. When leaders no longer trust law, equality, and restraint to hold, they substitute recognition for rights and symbolism for structure. DEI fills the vacuum left by civic uncertainty. It cannot repair it.
The American experiment succeeded not by perfecting inclusion but by constraining power. It did not ask institutions to decide who belonged. It presumed belonging and limited the authority of those who might question it.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Jews should be clear-eyed about this distinction. A pluralistic society is strongest when belonging is presumed rather than curated, and when citizenship is treated as a baseline rather than a reward.
Warmth matters. Goodwill matters. But they are not substitutes for equality under a civic order that does not ask groups to justify their place.
Jewish history is clear on this point. Societies where Jews are welcomed at the discretion of elites are less stable than those where Jewish belonging is assumed as principle. The former depends on mood and politics. The latter endures through disagreement.
Washington’s letter to Newport promised something no amount of programming can replicate: a republic that gives to bigotry no sanction because it refuses to make belonging a matter of official judgment at all. That is an inheritance worth defending. The distinction between the affirmation model and the Washington model is not only a Jewish concern. It is central to the durability of pluralism.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.