In America, Jews face less public anti-Semitism than their co-religionists in the UK. Yet they have had reason over the past year to grow increasingly concerned for their own safety, although they don’t have to worry about being visited by the police for talking about the threats. And they have other freedoms as well. Hannah Meyers notes that “gun shops in areas with large Jewish populations reported 75-percent increases in first-time ownership in the immediate aftermath of October 7.”

In Meyers’s in-depth investigation into the ways Jews in the U.S. have responded to their newfound vulnerability, the best approach might come from the Israeli-born Krav Maga instructor Tsahi Shemesh:

A former IDF paratrooper, Shemesh actually lost some clients who were uncomfortable with his visible support for Israel and Israeli hostages after October 7. . . . And like many Krav Maga studio managers, he’s seen an upsurge in Jewish enrollees looking to bolster their self-protection.

For Shemesh, being visibly Jewish in all situations reinforces that empowering sense of choice. These days, he says, “I don’t even leave home without a Jewish identifier. I don’t want someone to mistake me for not a Jew.”  [Another martial-arts expert, Rabbi Yossi] Eilfort, shares this sense that concealing one’s Jewish identity actually creates or invites a lack of safety: “When we hide being Jewish, we embolden them to attack us because we’re running. And then they are encouraged to do it again.”

Meyers concludes that “American Jews who want to make themselves safer” must “focus on reinforcing the most important potential choice: the option to be a public Zionist in America.”

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.