In this nervous time, one episode of my life keeps coming to mind. It was 1959—I was in my early twenties and the Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever was in my parents’ living room in Montreal at a reception in his honor. He had come from Israel on his first speaking tour of North America. A poet and celebrity, he was a proven hero—he had survived the ghetto of Vilna, escaping with members of the Jewish underground to join the partisans in the Naroch forest of what is now Belarus. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the Soviet Union sent a small plane to a landing strip near the forest to airlift him and his wife to Moscow, where he was received as a first eyewitness to the murder of his people, then delegated to speak as a representative of Jewry at the Nuremberg Trials.

A few days earlier, my family and I had been among hundreds at Sutzkever’s public lecture. But now he had come to our home to attend a reception for his fellow survivors of Jewish Vilna, the city known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Yerusholayim d’Lite. My mother was a native of Vilna, my father a graduate of its university, and among those present were other survivors of the ghetto, a fellow partisan, and fellow poets who had come from New York and Toronto.

In this intimate gathering, Sutzkever spoke about their destroyed community. In the 1930s, before the war, he had been a member of a group of young poets and painters who called themselves Yung (Young) Vilna—and he began talking about a member of that group, not Chaim Grade who was already well known, but a certain Moyshe-Itske, its most idiosyncratic member, who had to be hospitalized part of the year for mental issues. Between such episodes, he would show up at group meetings and function fairly well. But one day, as Sutzkever described it, Moyshe-Itske suddenly burst into his room and said, “Abrashe, I’ve come to tell you that I’m not going to die. I’m going to live forever!”

Abrashe, as Sutzkever was known to his friends, realized that this man was probably slipping into his mania, and tried to bring him back to reality. He said, “Look, Moyshe-Itske, I know there are three men you admire—Napoleon, Dostoevsky, and Moses, our beloved Moyshe Rabbeinu. Well, Napoleon, great as he was, died in exile on the island of Elba. Dostoevsky’s execution by firing squad was called off at the last moment, but eventually he died in Saint Petersburg, and Moses did not even live to enter the Land of Israel.” Moyshe-Itske was quiet for a moment, and then he shouted, “Eyner muz zikh durkhraysn!” “Someone has got to break through!”

That was it. End of talk. The room fell silent. No one asked for an explanation, and I don’t remember one being offered. (You might understand why I chose to study Yiddish literature.) At the time, I thought the cry referred to the people in that room, every one of whom had miraculously broken through. Later I thought it must have signified Vilna, the undying legacy of that city of Torah scholarship and Jewish culture. But I believe Sutzkever meant to represent the death-defying presence of the Jews, as in the phrase, Netsaḥ Yisrael lo y’shaker, “the eternity of Israel will not fail” (1Samuel 15:29).

The survivors in that room had a right to think of themselves as the eternal people: they spoke Yiddish, a diaspora Jewish language that had developed over almost 1,000 years. Their community was so vibrant that on the eve of the war, students were pouring over the commentaries of the 18th-century gaon of Vilna in what had been his kloyz, his house of study, while their contemporaries were forging modern Jewish culture. So many religious and secular scholars crammed into the Strashun Library that two sometimes shared a single seat. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research had just opened its flagship building and had seeded branches in New York and Buenos Aires. The local Jewish Teachers Academy trained instructors for the network of Jewish day schools. There were Jewish theater groups and sports clubs, Jewish orphanages and publishing houses. The eternity of Israel was their present tense.

I had always thought of the post-Holocaust Jews in North America as very different from that beleaguered brilliance of Vilna almost a century ago. Since I am practical by nature, I realized that we had all broken through not metaphysically, but in the traditional Jewish way—through migration. We had used the usual escape route for Jews throughout our history. In the 1930s, as bad as things were, Jews of Europe and the Arab Middle East had two hopeful destinations for those who could reach them: North America held out the promise of personal freedom, and the Land of Israel promised the recovery of Jewish sovereignty. Migration had become a universal phenomenon, with many millions seeking refuge, but Jews had survived as a nation by relocating wherever they could find a haven. During that worst of times when one-third of the Jewish people was destroyed, there were not one but two strong paths of salvation.

Jews in the United States were fortunate to join a country inspired by biblical models of freedom and responsibility. This country was founded on truths that were hardly self-evident to the pharaohs or the tsars. The diaspora will never get better than this. We may regret that tens of thousands of Jews have used our unalienable rights to assimilate. But that they are no longer members of the tribe testifies to America’s genuine capacity for inclusiveness. This country does not mark us by our grandparents. The great German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine called baptism the “the ticket of entry to European culture,” whereas American Jews advertised that “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s bread” and Madison Avenue boasted, “Dress British, think Yiddish.”

In the United States Jews have more political agency than we ever had before. Jews used to depend on the shtadlan, the intercessor who negotiated for their security with the rulers. Because democracy is much messier than autocracy or despotism, its hundreds of elected rulers needed a huge lobbying framework. AIPAC began answering that need in the 1950s and 60s, and we know it was successful because being attacked is the surest sign of Jewish success. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson inspired a Chabad network that demonstrates just how creatively Jews can thrive out in the world when allowed to. American Jews have built federations, community centers, schools, synagogues, organizations, and research institutes that thrive wherever there is enough commitment to sustain them. Tikvah itself, publisher of Mosaic, gives incredible daily example of how to build a Jewish presence and future in America.

When it comes to Israel, words fail. The establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, three years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was the most hopeful sign of restored civilization since the dove returned with the olive leaf to Noah’s ark. Jesus is believed to have arisen after three days, and since Christianity adapted much from the Jews, I suggest we may in brotherly fashion consider the recovery of sovereignty three years after the Holocaust our national resurrection. About that restored sovereignty, my friend, the late Israeli literary scholar Gershon Shaked, wrote that there was no place for the Jewish people—Ein makom aḥer—other than in the Land of Israel. I agreed that sovereign Israel was the indisputable eternal center of the Jewish people, but tried to persuade him that since diaspora is also an enduring part of Jewish history, we should appreciate our interdependence: that most Jews now live in the Jewish state, and that the United States is the largest diaspora community, makes ours together the best circumstance we have ever enjoyed. Let that sink in—this is the best it has ever been.

But here is the corollary of this bounty. When enemies now strike at the Jews in Israel and here in America, we have no place to run. If we want to break through to eternity, we are going to have to do it—territorially—within existing boundaries. Many people, concerned by the rise of local anti-Semitism, have been asking, “Is it time for us to move to Israel?” We also hear from Israelis who tell us that family members are thinking of leaving the country. I reply, “If they’re selling their apartments, please let me know because I know people planning to move there.” There are Yiddish stories—bitter comedies—about Jewish communities fleeing to a neighboring town and meeting its Jews running in their direction. This impulse to flee—a natural instinct in times of danger—just reinforces the realization that as a people, we are done with running. Individual Jews may try to change their luck by changing location, in accordance with the talmudic dictum m’shaneh makom, m’shane mazal (“whoever changes his place, changes his luck”). But migration is no longer a national option.

That is why October 7 in Israel and October 8 in America have been such a shock. This war is unlike anything we have faced before, and we are unlike anything we have been before. October 7 differed from the Shoah—to which that single day was compared—but also from 9/11 and all earlier terrorist strikes. This was the first jihadist attack on a democracy that employed atrocities usually confined to so-called “primitive” societies. Rape, beheadings and mutilation, incinerating babies, and mass hostage-taking have not previously been used against New York or Paris. The medium being the message, the rampage warned Israel and its fellow democracies to forget about the niceties of coexistence or territorial compromise. The Palestinian Hamas invaders flaunted their contempt for the tolerant way of life that Jews represent, putting democracy on notice that jihad intended to destroy what it could not create.

This differed from the crimes of Nazis and Communists who had tried to conceal their sadism because they still felt part of the civilization they intended to conquer. The Germans murdered out of sight to lure unsuspecting Jews to the death camps, but also because their own civilian population would have flinched at having to see mass murder being committed in its name. Nazis claimed to be cleansing the West of the Jews, and Soviets killed behind the pretense of greater equality. The Hamas invaders did not hide their deeds in sequestered death camps or distant Gulags but broadcast their rampage as a tool of recruitment to families and tribes that share their values and ideological aims. They expected to inspire Hizballah, the Houthis, and a continent of Islamists in what they deem a civilizational conflict.

The jihadists spearheading this war realized that democracies and “start-up nations” can rally effectively against direct military attack but are exceptionally vulnerable when you demoralize them and know how to conquer them from within. Israelis were not seized as hostages for prisoner exchange—as we all keep pretending—but primarily so that they could be slowly abused and images of their deterioration used to sap Israeli morale. Hamas and Hizballah sacrificed their population as civilian casualties to force the Jews to do the one thing they least wanted: to kill their Arab neighbors. Forced to root out Hamas if they hoped to rescue their hostages, Israelis would rouse the righteous indignation of liberal media, international bodies, and human-rights organizations, and be blamed for slaughtering civilians. The moral inversion would be complete. Jews would be charged with the “genocide” that Islamists are waging against them.

Moral inversion was likewise the point of the parallel attack launched in America on October 8. Over 30 Harvard “Palestine solidarity” groups published a statement that day saying, “We the undersigned student organizations hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence” (emphasis mine). They added, “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum, . . . ” having organized in advance to blame Israel for the slaughter they knew would come. October 7 contrived the moral inversion that held Israel responsible for the war against it, and October 8 promulgated this inversion across America.

A grievance coalition had been agitating against America since the 1960s. The anti-war movement defined the U.S. as the land that napalmed villagers in Vietnam. Black Power said America was built on slavery. The radical left and Occupy Wall Street called it a capitalist monopoly of greed. LGBTQ activists condemned the homophobic reactionaries, radical feminists accused a misogynistic patriarchy, and anti-colonialists targeted white supremacy. The Palestinians gave this coalition of grievance groups a keffiyeh uniform and flag.

At the end of the 19th century—if you excuse the comparison—when Theodor Herzl was mocked for trying to build the Zionist movement, he said this to the skeptics: “You ask, what is a flag? A rag at the end of a stick? No, sir, with a flag one can lead men to where wherever one wishes, even to the Promised Land.” The homegrown intersectional coalition anchored in the universities and media now had a flag and a cause: the destruction of history’s old-new target, Israel with its Jewish supporters, as stand-in for the allegedly colonialist-imperialist-supremacist American regime.

This single snapshot of an expanding movement shows that history is not repeating itself but playing out on a larger scale than ever before. Jews must let go of the last war that ended in 1945, neatly packaged as the Holocaust: they and their fellow Americans cannot afford the luxury of fighting yesterday’s enemies. At Israel’s founding, Arab rulers launched against it the most lopsided war in history, refusing to accept the principle of coexistence, denying the Jews their ancestral homeland and insisting the Arabs of Palestine remain homeless as perpetual claimants to the Jewish land. Unable to destroy Israel in the wars of 1967 and 1973, the coalition of Soviet- and Arab-bloc nations passed the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. Recasting themselves as victims, certain Arab and Islamist leaders launched a propaganda war at home and abroad, attributing to Israel the bigotry that was embedded in their own authoritarian rule.

When almost 500 million Arabs and over 1 billion Muslims—possessing among them more territory than the United States—accused the Jews of displacing Palestinians, they should have lost all credibility with legitimate international bodies. That original inversion underlies all the others, making a mockery of the United Nations and corrupting many NGOs and human-rights organizations, in the same way that fascism destroyed the hopes once invested in the League of Nations. Once the UN became the vehicle for destroying one of its members, villainy gained the upper hand in international affairs.

It’s worth noting that this villainy extends to the wickedness of Arab and Muslim leaders who condemned Palestinian Arabs to perpetual refugee status instead of resettling, absorbing, and reinstating them in their bountiful lands. Jordan already occupies the largest share of mandatory Palestine. Egypt could have administered Gaza. And so on. When Hamas used civilians as human sacrifices it was doing what was done by other Arabs to their Palestinian brethren: using them to delegitimate and destroy their Jewish neighbors or die in the effort. If Palestinians were not turning the world against Israel, their coreligionists might be killing them, as other factions are doing to one another throughout the region. But this can in no way justify the Palestinian descent into barbarism.

With agency comes responsibility: now that Jews are in our ultimate destinations, with unprecedented freedom of action, we are obliged to confront and defeat those who come to destroy us. The inversions dare not be allowed to stand. American Jews should be blowing up the campaign of lies as ingeniously as the Israelis did the pagers of Hizballah. Defense is not a strategy, certainly not in the war of ideas.

Israelis defend the Jewish state bodily. The grievance coalition comes at America through its Jews: we are the portal. The moral-political inversion that works against us—Israel as apartheid, Jews as oppressors of Palestinian Hamas jihadists—this is the same moral inversion that attacks equal opportunity as class warfare and democracy as inequality, that tries to undo America’s progress from slavery to freedom by denying its exceptionalism. The intersectional coalition that marches behind the jihadist flag cultivates grievance in place of gratitude. If America betrays its Jews, it proves it is no better than Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Islamist Iran. The more the defenders of Israel allow themselves to be attacked and defamed, the more we confirm the failure of America.

The political odds against Jews are so great that our continuing survival sometimes feels as impossible as Moyshe-Itske’s, and yet we are no less confident than Sutzkever was in telling the story that we are and will remain the eternal people. Now, as against the highly charged events I have been describing, let me end with something immediate and perhaps about to become normal. I happened to watch a press conference at the end of November where New York City’s mayor Eric Adams introduced his new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a soft-spoken woman in her early forties who carries a prestigious Jewish family name. In accepting the position, she said that—on behalf of the police department, she was doing the work of tikkun olam—a phrase that is often misused for a progressive ideal of repairing the world, but that was appropriate in this context: we improve the world by standing up for the law by even more by enforcing the law. We improve the world, one borough, one city at a time as proud Jewish citizens by helping to maintain the Republic. A Jewish police commissioner maintaining civic order in the name of Jewish values restores the faith that brought us to this haven of refuge and keeps us determined to sustain it.

Tikvah is helping to create a new Vilna on the Hudson, and by example and patient instruction it has taken upon itself the task of helping the United States, now approaching 250 years, push onward in history. This indeed is one of our responsibilities as American Jews. We Jews are the blue and white in the red, white, and blue. The greater our strength and creative effort, the more we contribute to repairing the world. We cannot be expected to save America, but America cannot be saved by sacrificing us. We cannot save America by ourselves, but paraphrasing the Talmud, neither are we free to desist from making the effort.

This essay has been adapted from a speech given on December 8, 2024 at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York.