FILE PHOTO: A man, with an Israeli flag with a cross in the center, looks on next to police officers working at the site where, according to the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., U.S. May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

Shortly before the recent terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, writer Ashley Rindsberg, attending services at another British synagogue, was told by a friend, “I reckon Jews have about 10 years left in this country.”

When news of the Manchester attack arrived, Rindsberg’s friend said simply, “You see what I mean. Ten years.”

British Jews, in other words, feel they are now facing the choice between “the suitcase or the coffin” and, naturally, must choose the suitcase.

This would be par for the course in Jewish history, sadly. There is not a country to which the Jews have wandered — including medieval England — from which they have not, at some point, been expelled.

American Jews, however, have always seen themselves as exceptions to this history. They believe that such an expulsion, whether by official or unofficial coercion, “can’t happen here.”

America, they believed and mostly still believe, is different.

Some 20 years ago, I might have agreed with them. I no longer do. I now believe that, if things do not change, and change soon, American Jews might have 25 years left in the United States. If they’re lucky, they may have 50. Either way, the American Jewish story, like so many others, will have an unhappy ending.

Many would consider this hysterical scaremongering, and perhaps understandably so. But I fear it is not.

For example, I have spoken with at least one young American Jew who, having suffered egregious antisemitism on campus, has decided to make Aliyah. Yes, this is only one example, and whether they will make Aliyah in the end is uncertain. But I do know that for a young American Jew even to consider the option would have been, two years ago, unthinkable.

In other words, it is already happening here.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. American Jews need only see what is under their noses to know that it is happening here.

They can see it in the extraordinary extent to which they have already defined antisemitism down. Put simply, much like those young Jews who are now determined to flee, what was deemed unthinkable two years ago has already been normalized.

We need only look at what American Jews have already submitted to, largely without complaint:

They have been betrayed by personal friends and political “allies” at precisely the moment they most needed non-Jewish support.

They have been ostracized from social and professional spaces that once welcomed them.

They have been betrayed by the Democratic Party, their longtime political home, which has all but completely submitted to a takeover by its antisemitic wing.

They have been forced to avoid certain streets and neighborhoods for fear of their safety.

They have watched hate rallies and mobs pollute their cities, vandalize their property, attack their brethren, and generally conduct themselves like Cossacks while suffering few consequences for their crimes.

They have seen their children viciously abused in schools and universities.

They have suffered targeted harassment, intimidation, assault, and outright terrorism.

They have witnessed indifference to or outright collaboration in these crimes by the very non-Jewish authorities Jews once trusted to honor and secure their civil rights as American citizens.

None of this is unprecedented. It has already happened in France, Britain, and numerous other Western European countries in which Jewish life has now become essentially unlivable. There is no reason to think that, if it continues, the same will not happen in the United States.

It is true that there may be a temporary lull with the apparent end of the Israel-Hamas war, but Israel will fight another war. Even if, by some miracle, it doesn’t, the antisemites who emerged from their hiding places on October 8, 2023, will not disappear. Their genocidal ambitions are not confined to a specific conflict or war. They will continue their malevolent efforts by, as their favorite slogan says, “any means necessary.”

Sadly, because they have continuously defined antisemitism down, American Jews have already begun to accept all this as normal. They are adapting to what cannot be adapted to and tolerating what cannot be tolerated. They hope that lawsuits and onerous security measures at their institutions will succeed in stemming the tide.

But sadly, these are stopgap measures. The truth is that if American Jews persist in adapting and tolerating, then sooner or later, they will face the suitcase or the coffin.

In my new book Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, I argue that there can be only one answer to this: American Jews must rise in their own defense. Antisemites will always be there, but if Jews can set the price of antisemitism higher than that of leaving the Jews alone, all but a truly deranged few will back down.

This can only be accomplished, however, if the Jews learn to defend themselves by themselves, including through the legal and moral use of force. Accordingly, they must form a nationwide organization that can train them in things like self-defense techniques, weapons handling, tactical knowledge, and intelligence gathering, and then deploy them accordingly.

If American Jews find the will to do this, they may yet secure their future as Jews and Americans. If they do not, then I fear they will soon be saying, like their British brethren, “I reckon Jews have about 10 years left in this country.”

It will have happened here.

Benjamin Kerstein is an Israeli-American writer who is currently a fellow at the Z3 Institute. His book Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto is available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.

A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Nothing triggers a collective sense of repugnance like the sentence that starts with the words, “As a Jew.”

Regardless of one’s particular brand of Judaism or political affiliation, we have developed a Pavlovian reflex every time we hear those dreaded three words. If someone feels the need to qualify their unsolicited opinion with a heritage claim, it is quite likely that what will follow will be a diatribe of unimaginable bile and self loathing.

Over the past two years, we have been subjected to a barrage of this abuse. This phrase has become a moral shield, a rhetorical weapon, and a dime-store claim to authority. This empty prejudice disclaimer is as vacuous as it is vapid. They presume that this will somehow immunize them when in reality it exposes their cowardice and cheap attempts at using their Judaism as an alibi.

In America this has become politically endemic. While the Jewish community should have been proud of our Jewish representatives in government, we have grown accustomed to them using their “as a Jew” card at every politically expedient opportunity.

Obviously, there is a whole slew of influencers, journalists, and even comedians, who firmly believe that those three magic words, are a “get out of racist jail free card.”

Being a “Jew,” however, doesn’t make you an expert on Israel if you know absolutely nothing about what is happening there.

In fact, when these vapid celebrities claim to have a reasoned opinion on Gaza because they are Jewish, they prove that Israel is seen as a representative of the Jewish people. And they prove that when antisemites claim to only hate “Zionists,” this is nothing more than a convenient lie.

We rightly take offense when an antisemitic polemic is prefaced with “some of my best friends are Jewish,” but somehow the insolence is far more stinging when it comes from someone Jewish (or someone who was born Jewish, but does not identify with being Jewish anymore).

This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, there is a checkered history of Jews desperate for acceptance into gentile society, abandoning their own.

As an example, in Paris 1240, a former yeshiva student, Nicholas Donin, encouraged King Louis IX, to put the Talmud on trial. He argued to the King that as a Jew, he was personally aware of inconsistencies that contradicted and blasphemed New Testament scriptures. The result was dire for the Jewish community.

It happened again in 1263 in Barcelona, when Pablo Christiani — another former Jew — convinced King James I of Aragon of a similar fallacious premise, which resulted in a public debate with the Ramban (Nachmanides). Again, the results for the Jewish community were catastrophic and the Ramban ended up exiled, despite his victory in the debate.

This was a fairly regular pattern in our European history and continued straight through the Enlightenment era.

Karl Marx, another famous “As a Jew,” authored the famous “On the Jewish Question,” which equated Jewishness with material greed. Same story with a secular gloss — repudiation disguised as virtue. The list goes on and on.

To complicate matters further, Judaism today spans an incredibly broad, fragmented, and diverse spectrum and there is little agreement within the tent as to an actual definition of membership.

Ironically for the first time in our history, we have people clamoring to substantiate the most tenuous of claims to Jewish heritage.

Take the current Prime Minister of England, Keir Starmer. Before last year’s general election, in an effort to cleanse the stench of antisemitism that clung firmly to the Labor Party, he surprisingly discovered his “Jewish roots.”

Fast forward little more than a year and he is hugging Mahmoud Abbas on the steps of Downing Street, threatening to arrest the democratically elected leader of Israel and recognizing a Palestinian state. This virtue signaling “As a Jew” Prime Minister set the tone and tempo for the open displays of antisemitism that are now a feature of British Jewish life.

Once upon a time, to speak “As a Jew” was to shoulder the weight of history, and to defend the vulnerable even when it lacked popularity.

What this crowd is lacking today, is another essential Jewish virtue: pride. Jewish pride is a defining factor of our survival and is the antidote to this epidemic of pseudo moral vanity that has rampaged public life.

Jewish identity is not determined by your grandparents, but by your grandkids. It is easy to declare that you are Jewish, but it is far more difficult to actually walk the walk. Being Jewish means a lot of things to a lot of people, but ultimately it boils down to bearing the weight of our history, enduring the ostracism in the present, and ensuring the continuity of our values for the future.

You can be antisemitic and be Jewish. If you have absolutely no knowledge about what’s happening in the Middle East, it doesn’t matter that you start a sentence with, “As a Jew.”

The world will always tell Jews to start every sentence with an apology. Our task is to end every one with pride.

Philip Gross is a Manhattan-born, London-based business executive and writer. He explores issues of Jewish identity, faith, and contemporary society through the lens of both American and British experience.

Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS

In a recent Fox News interview, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refused to say whether Hamas should lay down its arms. When pressed to elaborate, he replied:

I don’t really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law, and that applies to Hamas, that applies to the Israeli military, and that applies to anyone you could ask me about.

There is something appealing about his answer. Why do we need to take sides in disputes far away? After all, we just have to insist that international law be followed, and then problems will be resolved in a fair and peaceful way.

But in practice, what does this mean? Who holds the power to establish international law, and who has the power to enforce it.

International law is based in part on treaties signed by governments, and the cornerstone treaty on international relations is the UN Charter. So does Mamdani believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict should be resolved by the UN Security Council, whose main job is to maintain international peace and security?

Does Mamdani accept that his political foe, Donald Trump, has veto power over the Middle East? Should the Ukraine war be resolved by a body in which Russia has a veto? There’s always the General Assembly. But how can Israel be asked to accept a forum in which the dozens of Muslim countries each have their own vote and can gang up against it? And does it make sense that tiny Tuvalu and Grenada have equal say on European and Middle Eastern affairs as the countries there? Both the General Assembly and Security Council failed to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks in a timely manner. Did that abide by international law?

The reality is that a reasonable and effective form of world government has not yet been invented.

More plausibly, Mamdani might be referring to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the judicial arm of the United Nations. It is currently hearing the complaint that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In July of 2024, the ICJ also produced an advisory opinion in which it determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and should end immediately. Israel is not complying with this ruling, and even if it wanted to it’s hard to see how it could. But perhaps in turning to international law Mamdani means that this ruling of the ICJ, and others like it, should be followed.

But aside from criticizing this particular opinion as both biased and impractical — and indeed, even putting aside the strong questions about the ICJ as a whole — there is a bigger problem. The ICJ’s role is only to provide legal background and advice, whereas it is for the General Assembly or Security Council to decide on implementation (Advisory opinion par. 281), bringing us back to the issues above.

Furthermore, baked into the ICJ is a fundamental unfairness. In the genocide case, the ICJ only has jurisdiction over countries, not non-state armed groups. This means that while the ICJ will pore over thousands of pages of evidence against Israel, carefully scrutinizing every statement made by Israeli leaders and every action taken by the IDF, it will pay Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, indiscriminate rocket fire, and hostage taking limited or no attention at all.

In its advisory opinion, the General Assembly requested that the ICJ examine only, “The legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel.” What about the legal consequences of decades of Palestinian terrorism, rejection of peace offers, and threats to wipe Israel off the map? The ICJ was told to ignore all of that. How can a system whose scrutiny is so blatantly one-sided produce a just result?

Of course there are other relevant areas of international law. We can try to insist that both sides in conflicts respect human rights, such as by not using conflict as an excuse to discriminate, arbitrarily detain, or collectively punish members of the opposing group. We can also advocate for adherence to the laws of armed combat, so even when conflicts turn violent civilians are spared unnecessary harm.

But these are just behavioral norms to manage disputes, not solve them. This is the truth Mamdani misses — international law is unable to offer a fair or reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Negotiation between the parties, based on compromise and looking to produce a better future while letting go of grievances from the past, is the only way forward.

So not only should Mamdani condemn Hamas for the atrocities it has committed and insist it comply with the ceasefire by laying down its arms, but both he and all of us should also have an opinion about its future.

Hamas preaches armed resistance and espouses impossible-to-meet, maximalist demands, both of which are incompatible with negotiation. If we want to avoid a future of endless war and suffering, that means we must want a future without Hamas, too.

Shlomo Levin is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah, and he uses short fiction and questions to explore human rights at https://shalzed.com/