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Hiroshima, the 10th Plague, and the Strength to Take Decisive Action Against Evil
509th Composite Group aircraft immediately before their bombing mission of Hiroshima. Photo: Wikipedia
In the late 1980s, when I was a student at Ner Yisrael Yeshiva in Baltimore, I had a close friend who took night classes at Johns Hopkins University. One evening, he came back visibly shaken. That night’s guest speaker had been Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the Enola Gay and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
My friend told me that Tibbets spoke calmly and deliberately, with the controlled precision of a career military officer. He made no attempt to dramatize what he had done, nor did he flinch from its consequences. Dropping the bomb, he said, was the correct military decision, adding bluntly, “I would do it again.”
His point was straightforward: the atomic bomb ended the war quickly and spared the world a catastrophic invasion of Japan that could have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and untold numbers of Japanese lives as well.
Tibbets did not deny the human suffering the bomb caused, but he rejected the idea that this suffering made the mission wrong. He expressed no regret about carrying it out. In his view, it saved lives precisely because it brought the war to an immediate end.
At the time, I filed it away as an unusual but interesting historical tidbit. This week, as I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the memory of hearing about Tibbets’ talk at Johns Hopkins came roaring back.
The museum is harrowing in ways that are hard to describe. Photographs of survivors, their burned skin hanging from their bodies. Metal objects fused together or melted almost beyond recognition by the heat of the blast. A hauntingly scorched child’s tricycle. A watch frozen at the exact moment the bomb detonated. Photos of victims bearing massive keloid growths years after the war, their bodies grotesquely reshaped by the long reach of that terrible day.
The suffering is overwhelming, graphic, and impossible to ignore. Tens of thousands were killed instantly. Tens of thousands more died from horrific burns in the days that followed, while others from radiation sickness and cancer years later. Most were civilians.
And yet, what struck me almost as powerfully as the horror of what was there was what wasn’t there. There is almost no context. No mention of Japan’s stubborn refusal to surrender. No discussion of the horrific war crimes committed by the Japanese across Asia. No reference to Pearl Harbor, the deadly attack on America launched by Japan in December 1941 without a declaration of war.
In fact, the Americans barely appear at all. It almost feels as if the bomb descended from the heavens – an act of cosmic cruelty, unconnected to history, agency, or responsibility.
To be clear: none of this diminishes the suffering. Nothing could. But the absence of context matters. Because without it, war becomes a morality play with only one role assigned – that of the victim – and no serious questions are asked about how wars actually end, or how they begin in the first place.
And that question is unavoidable in the 21st century: how do we reconcile our horror at the impact of war with the reality that wars sometimes must be ended decisively – because not ending them can be the worse of two evils?
Public attitudes toward the atomic bombings of Japan reveal just how uneasy we have become with that question. In 1945, immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Gallup poll found that 85 percent of Americans approved of the decision, with only a small minority disapproving.
By 1990, approval had fallen to 53 percent – but it largely held steady through the early 2000s. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center found a clear majority of Americans still saying the bombings were justified.
But over the past decade, something has shifted. A Pew study published last August, marking the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima, shows a public deeply conflicted. Only 35 percent now say the bombings were justified. A full third are unsure. Nearly 70 percent believe nuclear weapons have made the world less safe.
To be fair, that discomfort is understandable. It is also historically naïve.
It is no coincidence that I found myself wrestling with this question in the same week we read Parshat Bo – the Torah portion that confronts this moral dilemma head-on.
The 10th plague to strike ancient Egypt, Makat Bechorot, is unlike anything that comes before it. Until that point, Egypt has endured economic collapse, environmental devastation, disease, and widespread suffering. Pharaoh has been warned, pleaded with, negotiated with. None of it works. He absorbs each blow and refuses to consider surrender.
And then, in a single night – in one devastating, irreversible moment – the war ends. Every firstborn son in Egypt dies. There is not a single home untouched by the plague. Pharaoh summons Moses in panic – he himself is a firstborn and fears for his own life – and in the dead of night the terms of redemption are agreed. By morning, the Israelites are on their way out of Egypt, free and unchallenged.
The Ramban makes an essential point that is often missed: the final plague was not merely punitive. It was decisive. The earlier plagues failed precisely because they were survivable. Pharaoh could absorb the damage, regroup, and convince himself that he could endure one more blow.
The death of the firstborn changed all that. The shock of this final plague was so absolute that Pharaoh could no longer entertain defiance.
Ramban is clear and unsentimental: gradualism is not merciful – it is ineffective. As long as Pharaoh believed Egypt could stagger on, Israel would remain enslaved. Ending the conflict required an act so overwhelming that the very idea of continued resistance collapsed.
The Maharal of Prague goes even further. He explains that Egypt was not merely an enemy nation – it was a corrupt moral system built on dehumanization and cruelty. Incremental punishment could never undo it. Only a shock powerful enough to reorder reality itself could break Egypt’s grip on history and end its cruelty. The 10th plague was not about vengeance. It was about ending Egypt’s capacity to perpetuate evil.
Seen through that lens, Hiroshima looks different – not less tragic, but more intelligible. By the summer of 1945, Japan had lost its navy, its air force, and much of its urban infrastructure. Still, it refused to surrender.
US military planners warned that a ground invasion would lead to catastrophic casualties on both sides, with civilians trapped in the middle for months or even years. The atomic bomb ended the war almost immediately. Like Makat Bechorot, it was horrifying – and precisely for that reason, it worked.
This is not an argument for cruelty. It is an argument against moral theater – against pretending that drawn-out wars fought “humanely” are somehow kinder simply because their brutality is dispersed over time and geography. There is a difference between loving peace and being unwilling to confront the cost of ending war.
The Torah never asks us to celebrate Egyptian suffering. On the contrary, our Seder night rituals deliberately acknowledge it. But the Torah also refuses to sanitize redemption. Freedom did not come through endless diplomacy or moral posturing. It came through decisive, devastating force – after every other avenue had failed.
Standing in Hiroshima, surrounded by reminders of the unimaginable pain caused by the atomic bomb, I felt the full weight of that tension. But on reflection, Paul Tibbets understood something we in the 21st century have grown uncomfortable admitting: grief and justification can coexist. Mourning and moral clarity are not opposites.
Parshat Bo teaches us that sometimes, when evil refuses to let go, we are forced into terrible choices – not because we want to make them, but because there is no other way forward. It is a lesson worth remembering in an age that fears consequences more than it fears the endurance of evil.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Forverts podcast, episode 8: Subway stories
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם אַכטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „די אונטערבאַן“.
אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן צוויי אַרטיקלען: משהלע אַלפֿאָנסאָס פּערזענלעכן עסיי „און אַלץ צוליב אַ יאַרמלקע!“ וואָס איר קענט אַליין לייענען דאָ, און אַ צווייטן אַרטיקל פֿון שׂרה־רחל שעכטער, „זכרונות פֿון אַן אונטערבאַן־פּאַסאַזשיר“, וואָס איר קענט לייענען דאָ.
צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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New York City Police Investigate Antisemitic Subway Assault
New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating an antisemitic incident in which an African American male assaulted a Jewish public transit commuter on the subway, according to local reports.
The victim, Jeremy Garrett, told an ABC affiliate that he was reading a psalm on Monday morning when the assailant struck him on the head, knocking off his kippah in the process. Garrett later received treatment at a local hospital, WABC-TV reported.
“I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett recalled. “We tussled a bit, I was trying to hold him on the train, and then the doors closed, and they opened the doors again, and he ran off … it’s horrible because it happened on Purim, you know, right before the holiday.”
Garret added, “I still want justice, but I do forgive the man … They keep coming for us. We still keep living, so we’re not going to stop.”
New York City has seen similar incidents in recent months. In January, a woman was punched in the face while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F—k Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F—k Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
Just last month, a 17-year-old student who attended the Renaissance Charter School in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens borough called on his classmates to “rise up and kill the Jews.”
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have seen a dramatic rise in recent years. The latest NYPD hate crime statistics show a 182 percent increase in January 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to other data issued by the NYPD.
A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitism in New York City has eroded the quality of life of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which is the target in many antisemitic incidents.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2025, New Yorkers have seen organized antisemitic harassment. In November, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“The Jewish community is filled with anxiety and trepidation. We know that it’s open season,” Rabbi Mark Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said in a statement to NY1 in February. “We’ve encountered these kinds of threats for the last 2,500 years, but if anything, there’s never been a greater time to be alive as a Jew than today.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.
In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.
Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.
Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it. And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions.
It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values, or bringing them back into alignment.
Shifting sympathies
A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with Israelis.
Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far-left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.
These claims ignore a simpler explanation: That the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy, and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in the Strip to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyhau continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars, or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.
In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.
No more cognitive dissonance
Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.
For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist,. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist,” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such).
In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.
There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.
Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”
What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.
What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.
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