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Hebrew school enrollment across US down by nearly half since 2006, report says
(JTA) — Living in Brooklyn, surrounded by synagogues and Jewish schools, Rachel Weinstein White and her husband hoped to find a place where their children could receive a Jewish education for a few hours each week.
But they knew they didn’t want to enroll at a traditional Hebrew school associated with a local synagogue. For one thing, White wasn’t interested at the time in participating in prayer services, the main offering of most congregations. Plus, her husband is Black and not Jewish, and they were not sure how well he or their children would be welcomed.
So about eight years ago, she started her own program together with a few families, setting up a cooperative and hiring a teacher in an early version of the “learning pods” that would become a pandemic fad.
“It was just this incredible, magical year,” White said. “So many people started hearing about our little class and asked to join that it became necessary to create a second class. … It just kind of grew organically from there.”
Today the school, Fig Tree, enrolls about 350 children across three locations and plans are underway to expand further. In hour-long classes on Sundays and weekday afternoons, children learn about Jewish holidays and history, engage in art and creative play, explore their local Jewish communities and learn basic Hebrew, in a program that culminates in a b’nai mitzvah year. It overlaps significantly with traditional Hebrew schools, but outside the usual setting — a synagogue classroom — that has become a cultural shorthand among American Jews for rote, uninspiring Jewish education.
That dynamic may be why Fig Tree is an outlier in a stark trend revealed in a new report: Enrollment in supplemental Jewish schools — those that students attend in addition to regular schooling in public or secular private schools — is down by nearly half over the last 15 years.
Even as the estimated number of Jewish children in the United States rose by 17% between 2000 and 2020, enrollment in Hebrew schools fell by at least 45% between 2006 and 2020, according to the report by the Jewish Education Project, a nonprofit that promotes educational innovation and supports Jewish educators in a wide array of settings.
The report identifies pockets of growth, mostly in the small number of programs like Fig Tree that operate outside of or adjacent to synagogues, and in schools operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. But overall, according to the report, just 141,000 children attend supplemental Jewish schools in the United States and Canada, down from more than 230,000 in 2006 and 280,000 in 1987.
Some of the decline in Hebrew school enrollment is countered by increasing enrollment in Jewish day schools, where students study Jewish topics for at least part of every day. The number of U.S. children attending Jewish day schools has risen by roughly the same amount, 90,000, that Hebrew school enrollment has fallen since 2006, according to the report, though a significant portion of the increase stems from population growth in Orthodox communities, where the vast majority of students attend day schools.
Miriam Heller Stern, a professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who was tapped to help design the study, said the results suggest that, as with many aspects of religious life today, Hebrew school enrollment cannot be counted on as an act of obligation or tradition.
“There’s this idea that parents send their kids to Hebrew school because they went to Hebrew school and that’s a rite of passage in North America, but that may be a myth,” she said. “People don’t want to push their kids to have to do the same thing they did, necessarily, anymore.”
The report speculates about what has fueled the enrollment decline — from demographic changes to shifts in how American Jews think about countering antisemitism to increased access to Jewish learning online — and also about what has allowed some schools to thrive. It notes that all of the supplemental schools that responded to its census said their schools help children feel connected to the Jewish people.
“We believe that many factors have led to the decline in enrollment of students in supplemental schools in the last decade,” said David Bryfman, the Jewish Education Project’s CEO. “However, it’s also a myth that all supplemental schools don’t work.”
The group is planning a series of online sessions with some of the dozens of researchers and practitioners involved in the report, with one goal the sharing of success stories identified by the survey. Of the six identified in the report, a common theme is urging experiential, community-based learning. Some of the promising models explicitly position themselves as infusing Jewish content into child care, filling a pressing need for American families.
Still, it may be hard to counter the demographic realities of contemporary American Jews: Just a third of U.S. Jews in a 2020 survey said someone in their household was a member of a synagogue. That was the case even for the majority of non-Orthodox Jews who said they identified with a particular denomination, a marker of traditional engagement.
The waning of synagogue affiliation is borne out in the Jewish Education Project’s report, which found that more than 700 supplemental schools shuttered between 2006 and 2020 — most outright, though as many as 200 have survived in a new form after merging.
Temple Solel, a small Reform congregation in Fort Mill, South Carolina, shut down its Hebrew school in recent years. The volunteer-run program had up to eight students at a time, according to Russ Cobe, a lay leader.
“We sort of hit a point where we weren’t able to sustain it,” Cobe said. “We only had a couple of people teaching and students from a wide range of ages and they wouldn’t show up every week. Also, our wheelhouse seems to be retirement age and above. We don’t have a lot of young families.”
Hebrew school mergers offer one possible approach to countering the enrollment decline. Two synagogues, one Reform and one Conservative, located half a mile apart in Oak Park, Michigan, established a joint school about seven years ago and called it Yachad, which means “together” in Hebrew.
“One day a week we meet at the Conservative congregation and one day a week we meet at the Reform congregation, so we are keeping our kids involved in both,” said Gail Greenberg, Yachad’s director. “My goal is to make it at the highest common denominator. For example, all of our food is kosher so anyone who wants to eat here can.”
The arrangement appears to be working. Last year, about 90 students were enrolled, and this year, enrollment is at 128, including 26 new kindergarteners, with even larger numbers expected in the future.
Another set of programs has grown dramatically in recent years: those affiliated with the Chabad movement, which tend to operate even when small and cost less than synagogue programs. Since 2006, the study says Chabad’s market share in terms of enrollment has grown from 4% to 10%, and in terms of the number of schools from 13% to 21%.
Those figures might represent an undercount, according to Zalman Loewenthal, director of CKids, the Chabad network of children’s programs. While the study says there are some 300 Chabad programs in the United States, Loewenthal said he is aware of at least 500 and perhaps as many as 600 — a number driven up in the last decade amid a push by Chabad to launch more Hebrew schools. His count is based on the number of customers purchasing the curriculum offered by his organization, which is also new in the last decade and in his view has contributed to improved quality among Chabad Hebrew schools.
In general, non-traditional approaches to Jewish education may be attractive at a time when American families have packed schedules and competing needs, according to Stern.
“People want to be able to have bite-sized pieces just like you sign up for a six-weeks art class, they might want a six-weeks Jewish class,” she said. “In this atmosphere, some communities are finding ways to be more modular and more flexible, and meet people’s needs in different ways.”
Stern also said, referring to six programs highlighted in the study as success stories, that the future calls for programs to offer an “immersive” experience, meaning that children become part of a community.
“They are getting something beyond just knowledge,” Stern said. “They’re also getting connection and belonging, which provides the foundation for something bigger in their lives.”
Stern said she thought the report pointed to gaps in the way American Jewish communities allocate their resources.
“Supplementary education really was abandoned as a communal priority,” she said. “Individual communities had to find ways to fund it on their own. And I think that is part of why we’re seeing a decline.”
Bryfman said he’s optimistic, both about the power of supplemental schools and the potential for them to generate new support from Jewish donors.
The Jewish Education Project had sought outside funding to pay for its study and failed, he said. But now that the numbers are clear, he is beginning to see interest from philanthropies.
“I don’t want to count the dollars before they’re granted,” Bryfman said. “But the study is already beginning to have the desired effect of bringing more resources to the field.”
Fig Tree isn’t set up to benefit in a possible future of increased charitable investments in Jewish education. That’s because the school is set up as a business — an expression of confidence in its growth and to insulate itself from the vagaries of philanthropy.
“It’s a very unusual model for the Jewish education and I would argue a self-sustaining one,” White said. “We don’t have to rely on fundraising… and we’re not beholden to some of the other requirements that a nonprofit would necessitate, which allows us to be nimble.”
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Iranian Leader Khamenei Killed in Strikes, Israel Says
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 3, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
The United States and Israel launched the most ambitious attack on Iran in decades on Saturday, and Israel said Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed in the operation.
Khamenei’s body has been found, a senior Israeli official told Reuters. Iranian news agencies Tasnim and Mehr, however, reported that the supreme leader was “steadfast and firm in commanding the field.”
Iran called the strikes unprovoked and illegal and responded with missiles fired at Israel and at least seven other countries, including Gulf states that host U.S. bases.
US President Donald Trump, who made the biggest foreign-policy gamble of his presidency after campaigning for reelection as a “peace president,” said the strikes were aimed at ending a decades-long threat from Iran and ensuring it could not develop a nuclear weapon.
Trump called on Iranian security forces to lay down their weapons and invited Iranians to topple their government once the bombing ended.
The US president later on Saturday told NBC News that “most” of Iran’s senior leadership has been killed. He said he believes reports of Khamenei’s death are accurate. “We feel that that is a correct story,” Trump told NBC News in a phone interview, according to a report on its website.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were many signs indicating Khamenei “is no longer” and called on Iranians to finish the job. He said Khamenei’s compound had been destroyed, and Revolutionary Guard commanders and senior nuclear officials had been killed.
Three sources familiar with the matter said Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh and Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammed Pakpour were killed in the Israeli attacks. Iranian media had said Khamenei’s son-in-law and daughter-in-law were also killed.
‘WE ARE TERRIFIED’
In cities across Iran, explosions caused widespread panic.
“We are scared, we are terrified. My children are shaking, we have nowhere to go, we will die here,” mother-of-two Minou, 32, said weeping as she spoke to Reuters by phone from the northern city of Tabriz.
Iran responded by launching missiles at Israel and at several Gulf Arab countries that host US bases.
After confronting hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks, the Pentagon said there were no US deaths or injuries.
The US military named the campaign Operation Epic Fury.
Iran issued a warning that the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which around a fifth of global oil consumption passes, had been closed. Traders expected a sharp jump in oil prices. Airlines canceled flights in the Middle East.
Tehran promised a stronger response to come, with a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, Ebrahim Jabbari, saying it had so far used only “scrap missiles” and would soon unveil unforeseen weapons.
The U.N. Security Council was due to meet in New York on Saturday. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.
Israel‘s military said some 200 fighter jets had completed the largest flying mission in its history, hitting 500 targets throughout Iran including strategic defense systems already damaged in strikes last year.
A girls’ primary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab was hit, killing 85 people, according to the local prosecutor cited by state media. Reuters could not independently confirm the reports. Israel‘s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TRUMP SAYS ‘BOMBS WILL BE DROPPING EVERYWHERE’
In a video message on social media, Trump cited Washington’s decades-old dispute with Iran and Iranian attacks, dating to the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Trump said the aim was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” He urged Iranians to stay sheltered because “bombs will be dropping everywhere,” but added: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
But he faced pushback from opposition Democrats, and a few of his fellow Republicans in the US government, who said a prolonged campaign against Iran would be illegal without congressional approval and that lawmakers should vote within days.
Netanyahu said the joint US-Israeli attack “will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands” and “remove the yoke of tyranny.”
Iran’s clerical leaders were already in a difficult position after mass anti-government demonstrations in January, which led to a crackdown in which thousands of people were killed in the worst domestic unrest since the era of the 1979 revolution.
Protesters had again taken to the streets in recent days in remembrance of those killed the previous month.
Israeli military operations over the past two years had already killed some of Iran’s senior military officials and severely weakened several of Tehran’s once-feared proxy forces across the Middle East.
After Israel pounded Iran in a 12-day air war in June joined by the United States, the US and Israel had warned that they would strike again if Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
The threats were backed up recently by a US military buildup in the region, even as Iranian and US officials held nuclear talks.
Eyal Zamir, the Israeli armed forces chief of staff, said that over the past months, he had been involved in preparing joint battle plans against Iran in coordination with senior leaders in the US military.
MISSILES FIRED AT ARAB GULF STATES
Oil markets have been closely watching the standoff. Jorge Leon, head of geopolitical analysis at Rystad Energy, predicted prices could shoot up by $10-20 per barrel when markets open on Monday, if there is no sign of de-escalation.
Iran, the third-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, pumps about 4 percent of global oil supplies, and a far larger share is shipped past its coast through the strait leading out of the Gulf.
In Israel, sirens and mobile-phone warnings sent Israelis rushing to air raid shelters as Iran launched a series of missile barrages. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or casualties.
Loud booms sounded in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, an oil producer and close US ally, and several blasts were heard in the business capital Dubai, where one of the city’s plush hotel districts was also hit.
Nada AlGarhy, 30, said she and her husband had been at the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Dubai’s luxury Palm development for Iftar, the evening meal during the fasting month of Ramadan, when they heard a loud explosion.
Bahrain said the service center of the US Fifth Fleet – base for American naval forces in the region – had been subjected to a missile attack. Video footage showed a thick grey plume of smoke rising from near the island state’s coastline.
Qatar said it had downed all missiles targeting the country and that it had a right to respond. Kuwait confirmed a missile attack on a US military base there.
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Before I became an orthodontist, I was my good friend Neil Sedaka’s saxophonist
When I first heard Neil Sedaka had died at the age of 86, I posted a Sedaka song on social media. I’m a Gen-X alternative rock fan, which is not exactly Sedaka’s lane, but it’s hard not to tip your hat to a pop culture legend. I posted “Standing on the Inside,” from 1973, and told people to wait for the chorus. Then, in the comments, my friend Beth Tichler Mindes from my Camp Tranquility summer camp days, wrote a sentence that stopped me: Neil and her dad had been in a band together when they were teens in the Catskills. She’d known Neil her whole life. I asked if I could talk to her 86-year-old father, Howie Tichler, and when I got him on the phone, he told me about the time in the spring of 1958 when he first met Neil Sedaka.
I first met Neil at the Kingsway Theatre on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. I was standing in the back near the popcorn. He was next to me, wearing a high school band sweater. I asked him what school he went to, and I told him I was a musician too. He said he was a piano player and that his band was auditioning for a saxophone player for a Catskills summer gig. I said, great, I’m in. It was that quick. He told me to come down to the basement and audition.
Honestly, I was at the theater to meet girls, not to watch the movie. That’s why I was hanging out in the back.
Before the audition, I spoke to my uncle, Sid Cooper. He was a saxophonist and woodwind player with the Tommy Dorsey band and later at NBC, playing with the Tonight Show band during the Jack Paar years and into the Johnny Carson era. He made sure I was ready. I needed a rhumba, a cha-cha, a foxtrot, a jitterbug. In those days you had to know the dances.
The audition was for a four-piece band. Neil wasn’t even the leader. He was just the piano player. The job was in the Catskills, at a hotel in Monticello called the Esther Manor. Esther ran the place, and her daughter, Leba Strassberg, worked behind the front desk. Neil would later marry Leba.
I don’t remember exactly how we got there. Maybe my father drove. Maybe someone in the group had a car. But we packed everything in and drove up.
When we arrived, we were told to introduce ourselves to the owner using only our first names. Half the band was Italian. In most places in the 1950s, people were hiding Jewish heritage. In the Catskills, Italian last names apparently wouldn’t go down so well. So, Eddie Caccavale became just Eddie. Paul Delova became Paul.
There were sometimes four of us, sometimes five. The group was called The Nordanels. My name wasn’t in the title because I joined a little late. The name came from Norman, David, and Neil. N-O-R-D-A-N-E-L-S.
If it was a wedding or a bar mitzvah, we wore white tuxedos. Sometimes black. At the hotels, it depended on the night of the week.
We worked six days a week, and this is no exaggeration. Afternoons, we played poolside for cha-cha lessons. Then we’d run back to our rooms, change, and play in the lobby as guests came in for dinner. After that, we played dance music before the stage show, then read the charts for the acts — usually, a dance team, a singer, or a comedian.
I was making about $85 a week, plus room and board. I wouldn’t exactly call it a room as I slept near the chicken coops. We didn’t get tips, either — unless you count being seated at dinner with the single girls.
I was born in 1939, so you can do the math. I was 18 when I started at Brooklyn College. By 1961, I was headed to Temple University in Philadelphia for dental school.
The Catskills gig helped pay for all of it as I could save every summer. Brooklyn College tuition was $15 a year, and they even threw in the textbooks. Dental school was another story. So the band gig felt like a gift.
People think of Dirty Dancing when you say Catskills. That came later. The movie is set in 1963, at a fictional resort called Kellerman’s. But the atmosphere was already there in the late 50’s and early 60’s. It was smoky. It was loud. It was hopeful.
At Esther Manor, single girls came up with their parents for the summer, and at dinner they would sometimes seat the musicians with the guests. So there we were, night after night, at long tables with our instruments nearby. We were in heaven. So were the girls.
I did this for six or seven summers. It wasn’t a one-time gig. I kept playing through my third year of dental school. After Carol and I were married, and I graduated, that era ended. From then on, I focused on dentistry. I’m a retired orthodontist, and I practiced on Long Island for about 45 years, and now I teach at Columbia. We originally lived on Long Island near my practice. My wife became a social worker and psychotherapist and opened a practice in Manhattan, so we moved halfway to the city. Once the kids flew the coop, we moved into Manhattan.
During the pandemic, we did something that still makes me laugh. Back when everything was masks, masks, masks, Carol and I were stuck in our apartment one day, and we wrote new parody lyrics to one of Neil’s songs. The original was “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” We turned it into “Masking Is Not Hard to Do.” I called Neil and told him we’d written these lyrics, and I emailed them over.
“Don’t take your mask away from me.
Don’t put my health in jeopardy.
If you don’t, then I’ll be blue,
Because what I am asking is not hard to do.
Remember when you held me tight.
We can’t do that now, but that’s all right.
Thinking safe will get us through,
Because masking is not hard to do.
They say that masking up is a difficult task.”
The next day we found out he’d posted it on Facebook. During the pandemic, he was doing this daily thing where he would sing three songs, and he introduced us and said we wrote the lyrics, and then he played it.
I guess I wasn’t so shocked when I heard he died, as when I spoke to him about a week ago, he was frailer than I ever heard him. But when we talked, we were right back to music.
We always talked about gigs we did together, about musicians who were on the job, and about little details he might have forgotten. For example, the last time we spoke, just two weeks ago, he said, you know that album I recorded that wasn’t very successful, where I sang a bunch of standards? I said sure, I remember it; I still have it. And he said, who was the piano player on that gig?
Our conversations were brief on family, and then we’d get into the details of the cool things we did together. It was always a walk down memory lane.
What I truly admired about Neil was his humility. He understood the unspoken thing between musicians. He knew my limitations, and he never judged my playing. He also knew I was an orthodontist. I had patients, not jam sessions. I wasn’t able to keep up my chops the way a full-time musician could, and he never made me feel like I was anything less than part of the band.
About 15 years ago, Neil called me up and said, “I’m on tour, and I have a gig at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. My saxophone player is stuck in Montreal. Can you come do the show with me?”
I said, “Sure, but you realize you’re asking an orthodontist to sit in with an eight-piece orchestra.”
He said, “No problem. I’ll fax you the music.” Fax. That’s how long ago this was.
So the music starts flying through my fax machine, half of it unreadable. I called Neil and said, “I’m doing the gig, but don’t expect me to be reading those charts. I’m going to do it by ear.” And he said, “Great.”
I drove up the night before because we had soundcheck the next afternoon. The band was there, Neil wasn’t even there yet, one of the other musicians was running the rehearsal. I’m standing in this magnificent old theater in the middle of New Haven, and I walked up to the guys and said, “Hi, I’m Howie Tichler. I’m really an orthodontist. So go easy on me.” And the guy says, “Neil told us everything. Don’t worry about a thing. Come on up. We’ll rehearse.”
They put me right behind Neil, so the spotlight wasn’t only on him. It was on me, too. The air conditioning was blasting, and it kept blowing my sheet music off the stand, so I’m trying to keep the pages from taking flight while also pretending I belong there.
Neil was incredibly gracious. He introduced the band and he said, “This is my friend Howie Tichler, who is really an orthodontist, and he came to help me out.”
And when I left the theater, I’m walking out with my saxophone on my shoulder, and a woman stopped me and said, “Can I talk to you for a second?” I thought she was going to compliment my playing.
Instead she asked me if she needed braces.
Right now, I’m mostly thinking about the good times. Whenever he came to Manhattan we’d meet up. We went to museums together — the Met, the Guggenheim. It wasn’t always about music. Sometimes it was just two old friends walking around looking at art.
He also came to visit us on Fire Island. Within half an hour, everyone in Fair Harbor knew he was at our house. Not because of an announcement, because of his voice. We had a little portable piano, and he’d sit down and sing. Someone walking by would hear it, stop, and then word would spread.
I actually sang on his first hit, “The Diary.” It’s a doo-wop song, and they couldn’t afford, or maybe couldn’t find, backup singers, so I became the backup singer on Neil Sedaka’s first record.
But the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the credit. It’s the sound of him in the room, that voice carrying out the window. In Fair Harbor you could hear him before you saw him.
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A war with Israel, not for Israel
This is the first Arab-Israeli war in history in which the Arabs and the Israelis are on the same side.
This striking, remarkable fact is a hopeful sign for a more peaceful Middle East, and for Jews around the world. The sad story we Jews tell ourselves about ourselves — that we are a people that dwells alone, spurned and unsupported — is playing out much differently on the news, and on the ground.
When Israel and President Donald Trump launched “Operation Epic Fury” on Feb. 28 the Iranian regime responded by launching missiles at the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
The targets were not just U.S. military bases, but civilian areas as well. A missile struck a suburban home in Amman, exploded over Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and killed an Asian national in the UAE, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
These attacks make clear that this is not Israel’s war alone, though arguably Israel has always been the primary target of the Iranian regime. That regime will lash out at any country threatening its hold on power, and even, or especially, at its own citizens.
Even if these Arab nations don’t officially engage against Iran, they have already been cooperating, opening up airspace to U.S. and Israeli jets, providing intelligence and staging areas. Azerbaijan, a majority Shia country bordering Iran, has been instrumental to Israel’s success against the regime.
That cooperation is not sudden, either. Leaked documents from October 2025 show that even as Arab states were publicly condemning Israel over the Gaza War, some were cooperating with it and the U.S. in creating a “Regional Security Construct” to thwart their common threat, Iran.
The solidity of that construct no doubt encouraged the current attack. Israel knew it wouldn’t have to go it alone. Not only did it have the tacit cooperation of most of its Arab and Gulf neighbors, it had the backing of the United States itself — the most potent military force in history.
A ‘People that dwells alone,’ really?
All of this runs counter to the stubborn story Jews tell themselves that we are without friends and allies in the world, facing terrorists and antisemites on our own. The war broke out just days before Purim, when Jews in ancient Persia — Persia! — faced annihilation at the hands of a vicious antisemite, Haman.
The Purim story frames Jews as anomalous and alone. They are, “a certain people scattered and dispersed among the peoples…whose laws are different from every other people,” Haman tells King Ahasuerus in his pitch to destroy them.
This Shabbat, called Shabbat Zachor, or the Shabbat of Remembrance, only reinforces the theme. The Torah passage in Deuteronomy depicts the evil attacker Amalek as preying on a weak, vulnerable and isolated People of Israel.
“You were faint and weary,” the passage states, “and he did not fear God.”
We have internalized these images, as well as Balaam’s words from the Book of Numbers — “a People that dwells alone” — and weaponized it against reality.
Yes, there are multitudes of real enemies and haters out there. My social media feed has already filled up with posts from the left and right accusing Israel of forcing Trump to fight its war.
“This is Israel’s last chance to blow up Iran with America’s military,” Tucker Carlson, the most insidious of the haters, posted two days ago, ignoring decades of the United States’ own fraught history with Iran. When the war broke out, Carlson called it “absolutely disgusting and evil.”
The far-right influencer Candace Owens announced that she “stands with Iran,” blamed Israel for this war and said that Charlie Kirk was assassinated “for this war.”
But the ferocity of these voices shouldn’t obscure the fact that in this war, Israel is far from alone.
How not to blow it
Of course how things begin is not always how they end. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, which Iran was instrumental in helping fund and plan, many countries voiced support or sympathy for Israel.
As Israel’s retaliatory attack ground on, that support evaporated. It was unclear how the war’s destruction matched its legitimate cause. Allyship is always conditional.
The worst-case scenarios of this war are evident to anyone who remembers the Iraq War: America dragged into a grinding war as Iran implodes into factional violence, with Israel blamed for it all.
In the best-case scenario, Israel and the U.S. narrowly target the regime and its military assets and take them out. Then Israel capitalizes on this military cooperation to seek close diplomatic ties with a new Iranian leadership, along with the Arab states that joined in its defense. That, of course, would entail compromises on the hardline, irredentist dreams of some of Israel’s own leaders.
In other words, how Israel emerges from this war will depend in part on its own actions, during and after the immediate conflict. But for now, the irrefutable truth is, we are not a people that dwells alone.
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