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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.
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The Yiddishist Yeshiva is open for registration
ס׳האָט זיך לעצטנס געשאַפֿן אַ נײַער סאָרט לייענקרײַז דורך פֿייסבוק, וווּ מע לערנט תּורה אויף ייִדיש צוזאַמען.
אינעם לייענקרײַז, וואָס הייסט „די ייִדישיסטישע ישיבֿה“, לייענט מען חומש מיט רש״י — סײַ אויפֿן אָריגינעלן לשון־קודש סײַ אויף ייִדיש־טײַטש. „די גרופּע איז אָפֿן פֿאַר אַלע מינים מענטשן,“ האָט דערקלערט דער לינגוויסט און ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסט לייזער בורקאָ, וועלכער האָט אָרגאַניזירט די גרופּע. „פֿרויען און מענער, ייִדן און נישט־ייִדן, געי און ׳גלײַך׳. נײַע תּלמידים דאַרפֿן פֿאַרשטיין ייִדיש גוט, אָבער זיי דאַרפֿן נישט האָבן קיין תּורהדיקן הינטערגרונט.“
די גרופּע טרעפֿט זיך יעדן דינסטיק דורך פֿייסבוק. נאָך מער פּרטים אָדער כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, שטעלט זיך אין קאָנטאַקט מיט בורקאָ, אויפֿן אַדרעס leyzertag@gmail.com אָדער דורך פֿייסבוק.
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A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall
(JTA) — When David Freedman discovered a long-forgotten photo album in his parents’ Montreal basement last year, he found nearly 100 pages of century-old photographs from his grandfather’s year in British Mandate Palestine, capturing Jerusalem street scenes, market stalls and holy sites.
The photographs were not only century-old and in near-perfect condition, but included figures who would later become central to Jewish medical and political history, among them Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem ophthalmologist Abraham Ticho, malaria researcher Israel Kligler, future British prime minister Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine.
David Freedman said he knew he had “struck gold” when he found the album, which had been untouched for decades. “I realized in disbelief I was looking at extraordinary images of Jerusalem,” he said.
Though Freedman said the album showed his grandfather’s “passion for skillful, impromptu photography,” it was images of a site that epitomizes endurance that are having the broadest impact.
Freedman’s pictures of the Western Wall has inspired a public appeal by the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum, which is asking people to look through old albums and attics for photographs, postcards and other visual material that could help expand the historical record of Judaism’s holiest site.
The request comes ahead of a major exhibition opening in 2027 marking 60 years since the 1967 Six-Day War brought the wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, under Jewish control for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Although the Western Wall is now one of the most photographed sites in the world, museum curators say the visual record of earlier decades remains surprisingly fragmented, with many of the most intimate images likely still tucked away in private collections and family albums.
“The Western Wall, the Kotel, in its simplest form, is a structure of ancient stones. Yet its true meaning has never resided in the stones alone — it has been shaped and elevated by the countless individuals who have stood before it over the centuries,” Eilat Lieber, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement.
Next year’s exhibition, titled “Eyes on the Wall” and curated by Shimon Lev and Yael Brandt, will be the first large-scale exhibition dedicated entirely to the Western Wall, the museum said, and will trace its transformation over nearly 2,000 years. It will be one of the major exhibitions staged by the Tower of David Museum since it reopened in 2023 after a $50 million renovation of its ancient citadel complex.
The wall, the exposed section of an ancient retaining wall around the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Jewish temples, has long been Judaism’s most sacred places of prayer and pilgrimage. From 1948 until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Jews were barred from going there.
Among its most iconic images was David Rubinger’s photograph of three Israeli paratroopers standing at the wall shortly after its capture, looking upward in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The picture was taken 59 years ago this week.
Abraham Orkin Freedman, a Canadian physician and Zionist activist, took his photographs before the site was so contested. He arrived in Palestine in July 1920, just as Britain was replacing military rule with a civil administration, and stayed until 1922, serving during that period as managing director of Hadassah Hospital. His grandson David, also a doctor, said the album’s timing gives it much of its historical value, with photographs that capture people in the streets, as well as the terrain and buildings of Jerusalem during the nascent years of the British Mandate.
Among the images Freedman uncovered, the one that struck him most was a photograph of women praying side by side with men at the oldest part of the Western Wall, a scene far removed from the gender-separated prayer sections at the site today. The question of mixed-gender prayer at the Wall remains politically charged, with a recent High Court order to advance the egalitarian section followed by Knesset moves to strengthen Chief Rabbinate control over prayer at the site.
After recognizing the album’s significance, Freedman met with his family who decided collectively to give it to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum for safekeeping, research and public access. Freedman said the family was proud the album had found “a new home, not many meters from where my grandfather once stood.”
Lev said he hoped the appeal would bring more discoveries like Freedman’s into public view, expanding the visual record of the Western Wall beyond official archives.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,” Lev said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall appeared first on The Forward.
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post 5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances appeared first on The Forward.
