By Bret Stephens
Sunday, February 15, 2026
After Édouard Manet caused a firestorm in the late 1860s
with his politically provocative paintings The Execution of Maximilian,
he got a consoling note from his friend, the poet and critic Charles
Baudelaire. “Monsieur,” Baudelaire wrote, “it seems you have the honor of
inspiring hatred.”
And that, in a sentence, is also the state of world Jewry
in 2026. The Jewish people—Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews; observant Jews and
secular ones; right-wing Jews and left; all of us together; all of us,
ultimately, in the same boat, whether we like each other or not—have the honor
of being hated.
We should take it as a compliment, just as Baudelaire
intended it.
We have the honor of being hated by the people who say
“Zio” when what they mean to say is “Jew.” We have the honor of being hated by
the campus lemmings chanting anti-Semitic slogans whose meaning most of them
aren’t bright enough to understand—though some of them understand it perfectly
well. We have the honor of being hated by Ali Khamenei, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
and other despots whose loathing of Jews is directly proportionate to their
crimes against their own people. We have the honor of being hated by Nick
Fuentes, Candace Owens, Alice Walker, Roger Waters, Francesca Albanese, Tucker
Carlson—the out-and-out Jew-haters and their sly enablers. We have the honor of
being hated by those who think Jesus was a Palestinian. We have the honor of
being hated by the so-called feminists who downplayed the rape of Israeli women
on and after October 7, and by the so-called progressives who denied it. We
have the honor of being hated by virtually every political movement, left or
right, that also opposes the idea of personal merit as an organizing social
principle. We have the honor of being hated by UN mandarins who would like you
to know that the preponderance of human rights violations are committed by one
small country: Israel. We have the honor of being hated by “Queers for
Palestine,” who have neglected to notice what happens to queers in Palestine.
We have the honor of being hated by the Hamas water carriers masquerading as
reporters at the BBC and other media. We have the honor of being hated by all
the Hollywood celebrities who see nothing amiss with demanding boycotts of
Israeli artistic institutions but not of, say, Chinese ones. We have the honor
of being hated by our charming new mayor, who thinks that he can endorse the
erasure of one state and one state only, the Jewish state, and still acquit
himself of the charge of anti-Semitism. We have the honor of being hated by
people who parade their so-called Jewishness only when it serves as a tool to
defame and endanger half the Jewish people—as if they’ll be spared the furies
should, God forbid, Israel someday fall.
In short, we have the honor of being hated by an axis of
the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged, and
the incurably stupid. What shall we do with all this hatred—other than to take
it as a badge of honor and turn it to our advantage?
***
I don’t want to sound flip about this or put on airs of
false bravery. This is a scary time to be a Jew. The “honor of being hated” is
also what led to the massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, the “Jew hunt” in
Amsterdam, the atrocities of October 7, the Tree of Life massacre in
Pittsburgh. It is why Israeli writers struggle to find publishers in the United
States, and why so many Jewish undergrads and Jewish professors feel ostracized
on college campuses.
It’s an honor we all yearn to do without. But we can’t.
We can’t, because for as long as there have been Jews, there have been
Jew-haters. And for as long as there will be Jews there will be
Jew-haters. What’s been going on for over 3,000 years is not about to end
anytime soon. And with that in mind, I want to make four specific arguments
about how to move forward with the knowledge we have gleaned.
The first point is that “the fight against
anti-Semitism,” which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish
philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish
organizations, is a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort. We should spend the
money and focus our energy elsewhere. The same, I might add, goes for efforts
to improve the quality of pro-Israel advocacy, or hasbara.
The second point is that while anti-Semitism may be
history’s most demented hatred, it’s also the world’s most unwitting
compliment. And here I am going to say something that may be misconstrued but
needs to be said: The Jew-haters have a certain point, because Judaism and
Jewish values and Jewish habits of mind are indeed subversive of many social
orders.
The third point is that the proper defense against
Jew-hatred is not to prove the haters wrong by outdoing ourselves in feats of
altruism, benevolence, and achievement. It is to lean into our Jewishness as
far as each of us can irrespective of what anyone else thinks of it. If the
price of being our fullest selves as Jews is to be the perennially unpopular
kids, it’s a price well worth paying.
Finally, the fourth point is that what Jews need now
isn’t allyship or sympathy or a seat at the table of the world’s victimized
groups. What we need is the wisdom of the composer Philip Glass: “If there’s no
room at the table, build your own table.”
So, to my first point: Does anyone think the fight
against anti-Semitism is working?
I know we all wish it could work. I know we’d like to
think that if only we ensured that Holocaust education was part of every public
school curriculum; or universalized the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism; or
persuaded universities to stop inviting Israel-hating speakers; or got the news
media to deliver fairer coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; or
alighted on history’s most brilliant PR strategy for Israel; or switched prime
ministers to nearly anyone other than Bibi—that if we did all this and more, we
could turn the tide that’s been running so heavily against us in recent years.
I also know that, now and then, we do achieve some victories, particularly when
it comes to getting university administrators to crack down on the most overt
expressions of anti-Semitic speech.
But here’s what I also know: that Tucker Carlson’s
popularity and influence as a podcaster have only soared as his bigotry has
become more blatant. That journalistic disgraces such as the fake report about
the 500 dead Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza did nothing to
prevent subsequent fake or grossly sensationalized reporting about the war that
perpetuated anti-Semitic stereotypes. That the governor of Pennsylvania was
asked if he’d ever been a “double agent” for Israel while he was being vetted
for his party’s vice-presidential nomination. That the vice president of the
United States dismissed the idea that anti-Semitism was widespread and rising
and instead pointed the finger at “people”—by which, of course, he meant Jews—
“who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s
relationship with Israel.” That, in New York State, with its abundance of
Jewish cultural institutions open to the public, 1 in 5 Millennials and
Gen-Zs believe the Jews caused the Holocaust.
All this is happening at a moment when the Jewish
community has never been more alarmed, more engaged, more resourced, more
eager, more courageous, and more willing to “do something.” So what is it that
those of us who are in this fight against anti-Semitism are missing?
The mistake we make is this: We think that anti-Semitism
stems, fundamentally, from missing or inaccurate information. We think that if
people only had greater knowledge of the history of Jewish persecution, a
fuller grasp of the real facts of the Israeli–Arab conflict, a finer
understanding of all the ways anti-Semitism manifests itself, a deeper
appreciation of the Jewish contribution to America’s success and to human
flourishing, that the hatred of us might dissipate or never start in the first
place.
But that thesis is wrong. Jew-hatred is not the result of
a defect in education: From Martin Luther to T.S. Eliot to Sally Rooney, the
world has never suffered a shortage of educated anti-Semites. Jew-hatred is the
product of a psychological reflex—and that kind of reflex can never be educated
out of existence even if, for a time, it may be sublimated into quiescence.
Anti-Semitism, in other words, isn’t just a prejudice or a belief. It’s a
neurosis.
This brings me to the second point we must examine, not
least because so many of the usual answers are so superficial: What is it about
Jews that has, over the centuries, aroused so much venom and violence?
Are Jews hated because of Israel’s alleged misdeeds?
That’s a common view these days, but it fails to explain the thousands of years
of anti-Semitism that preceded the creation of Israel, or account for why
hatred of Israel mimics classic anti-Semitic tropes of insatiable Jewish
bloodlust and secret manipulation of global affairs.
Are Jews hated because we represent the eternal “other”?
This, too, is often said, and of course there’s some truth to it. But there are
many “others” in every human society, yet none that are so persistently
subjected to such lurid conspiracy theories, such murderous designs, such
blatant double standards: Why has nobody written the book called “The Protocols
of the Elders of the Amish” or “The International Quaker”?
Are Jews hated because we refused to accept Christ as
Messiah or Mohammed as Prophet? Yes, sort of—but again, how do we account for
the centuries of Jew-hatred before the births of Christ or Muhammad, or for the
persecution of Jews whose families converted to Christianity?
All these explanations fail for the same reason that our
attempts to educate people out of their anti-Semitism fail: They do not account
for the psychological basis of anti-Semitism. That basis has a name:
resentment, marinated in the emotion of envy.
Resentment of what, exactly? Of just this: The Jewish
people are a countercultural nation. To make matters worse, our countercultural
convictions have helped us flourish nearly everywhere we have put down roots.
What are some of those convictions? We believe there is
one God—not many, not none—and therefore a common moral universe with a common
moral code that applies to all people, everywhere. We believe that human beings
are made in the image of God, and therefore that human life is inherently
precious, and that the lowest among us is equal in basic dignity to the
highest. We believe in freedom and the quest for freedom, and therefore we pose
a fundamental challenge to every tyrant who would deny that freedom. We believe
that the Messiah has not come, and therefore we are not beguiled
by any self-declared redeemer. We believe in the word and in the text, and
therefore in literacy as a foundation for faith, not a threat to it. We believe
that questions are of equal if not greater importance than answers, and
therefore that curiosity, second-guessing, and the quest for knowledge are
social goods. We believe in “argument for the sake of heaven,” and therefore in
disagreement that isn’t impudence and heterodoxy that isn’t heresy.
Above all, we believe in the word “no.” No to sun gods
and graven images and child sacrifice. No to Pharaoh and Caesar, the
Inquisition and the Reformation, the Czar and the Commissar. No to emancipation
from our peoplehood by the French Revolution or to the erasure of our faith by
the Russian Revolution or to the destruction of our statehood through the siren
song of bi-nationalism. No to the dethronement of God by reason, or of moral
judgment by moral relativism. No to the seductive offer of eternal salvation at
the cost of our covenant with God.
I don’t mean to suggest by any of this that Jews are
incapable of making our peace with our political and cultural surroundings.
Obviously we can, we have, and we do. But our yesses to our surroundings have
always been predicated on our noes, and what we affirm also requires that we
maintain the courage to reject. It is this courage that is the central source
of our inner strength as people and our endurance as a people. We must
never let go of it.
But “no” is also an infuriating word, however gently and
quietly it may be uttered. And that makes it a dangerous word. Ask anyone who
has been turned down by a college, an employer, a love interest: The normal
reaction to rejection is rage. That rage only grows when it is suffused by the
sense that, as with Cain in Genesis, one’s offering was not good enough; that
it was rejected from a place of judgment and therefore a position of
superiority. That is a basis for toxic rage. Conversely, the reason “people
love dead Jews,” to borrow Dara Horn’s memorable phrase, is that it replaces
that gnawing sense of inferiority with the pleasure of feeling pity.
***
It should go without saying that there is nothing Jews
can do to cure the Jew-haters of their hate—they can hire their own
psychiatrists. And there is nothing that we should want to do, either. Which
brings me to my third point: If it’s impossible to cure an anti-Semite, it’s
almost impossible to cure Jews of the delusion that we can.
You’re familiar with the sound of this delusion—you’ve
probably heard it from your uncle. It goes something like this: “Don’t they
notice the names on the hospital wings and the new campus centers? Aren’t they
impressed by all the Jewish Nobelists in medicine and physics and chemistry?
What about the fact that Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East,
the only place you’d want to be if you’re gay, the only place where brains are
more valuable than oil? And wasn’t it a Jewish doctor who cured polio?”
All true, of course, and it’s a wonderful thing that
there are so many creative Jewish minds and generous Jewish donors. It’s
wonderful, too, that Israel remains a beacon of democratic courage and social
creativity in the face of its adversaries. But this earns us no favors with the
haters. They do not hate us because of our faults and failures; they hate us
because of our virtues and successes. The more virtuous or successful we are,
the more we’ll be hated by those whose animating emotions are resentment and
envy.
And yet, as a Jewish community, we rarely seem to draw
the obvious conclusion: Constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy in order
to win the world’s love is a fool’s errand. In the 1990s, Israel repeatedly
took “risks for peace” for the sake of trying to end the occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza. It culminated in the second intifada and the rise of the BDS
movement. There isn’t a social justice movement in America in which Jews
haven’t played a founding or leading role. Yet virtually every one of those
movements is shot through with anti-Semitism.
This always seems to come as a shock to us, perhaps never
more so than after October 7, when we witnessed just how little compassion
there was for Jewish anguish, most of all from the very people to whom we have
given so much. We need to stop being surprised. We need to stop being wounded.
We need to stop being aggrieved and indignant.
I’d go further: We need to take this as an opportunity to
stop caring. The goal of Jewish life is not to ingratiate ourselves with others
so that they might dislike us somewhat less or love us somewhat more. The goal
of Jewish life is Jewish thriving. And by “Jewish thriving,” I don’t mean
thriving Jews, individually speaking. I mean a community in which Jewish
learning, Jewish culture, Jewish ritual, Jewish concerns, Jewish aspiration,
and Jewish identification are central to every member’s sense of him or
herself.
How we choose to invest in our Jewishness—whether more
religiously or more culturally or more politically or whatever—is up to each of
us to decide. But the main point is this: Jewish thriving happens not when
there are a lot of rich and successful and well-integrated Jews doing well and
feeling safe in their host societies. Jewish thriving happens when being Jewish
is not merely an incident of ancestry but rather the centering fact of life,
the source from which we derive meaning and purpose, our spiritual compass and
moral anchor and emotional safe harbor.
By this measure, what Franklin Foer called the “Golden
Age of American Jews” was fading long before October 7. It has been fading for
decades, starting when American Jews began to treat their Jewishness as the
most disposable part of their identity. It was fading when bar and bat mitzvahs
became the last Jewish ritual many American Jews observed in their life. It was
fading when intermarriage rates crept above 50 percent. It was fading as a
growing percentage of American Jews started to feel more embarrassment than
pride in Israel.
Now, however, we have an opportunity to reverse that
trajectory. And, paradoxically, this opportunity has been handed to us by our
awareness of our vulnerability, our unpopularity, our being hated. I’m the
person who coined the term “October 8th Jews” in a New York Times column.
Yet, in hindsight, I got the definition only half right. I said at the time
that the October 8th Jew was the Jew who “woke up to discover who our friends
are not.” What I should have said was that the October 8th Jew was the one who
“woke up trying to remember who he truly is.”
And this brings me, finally, to my fourth point: Building
our own table.
There are three great stories in the history of American
Jewry. The name for the first story is called “Arriving”: the story of the
first generation who came off the boats and lived in the tenements and never
forgot the old country. This is what Irving Howe called “The World of Our
Fathers.”
The second story is what Norman Podhoretz called “Making
It”—the story of American-born Jews who went through schools like Stuyvesant
and City College and went into professions like medicine and law; and of their
children, who went through Dalton and Yale and became investment bankers and
tech entrepreneurs.
Then there’s the third story. It’s called “Departing.”
Some of those departures have been to Israel: They include people like Jon
Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin of Chicago, parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin; or
Jim and Myrna Bennett of San Francisco, parents of Naftali Bennett. But there
are also internal departures: of Jews who, at some point in their careers, were
told they weren’t allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table and so went off and
sat at their own—ultimately creating investment banking, Hollywood, private
equity, most of today’s biggest law firms, not to mention Bloomberg and
Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and 1,000 other iconic American brands.
Those individual departures can serve as a model for what
the Jewish community, as a whole, must do to achieve the kind of Jewish
thriving I spoke of earlier. The infrastructure is already mostly there; the
scale isn’t. We have superb day schools. But we need many more of them—at
Catholic-school tuition rates—to give every Jewish family in America a chance
to give their children an excellent education rooted in Jewish values. We have
extraordinary Jewish philanthropies. But they need to become the primary locus
of Jewish giving, not the relative afterthought they are to too many major
Jewish philanthropists. We have Jewish priorities, but not a coherent funding
mechanism: Perhaps, as Jordan Hirsch suggested recently in Sapir, we
need the private equivalent of a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund. We have a Jewish
media that, to be honest, is something of a mixed bag but could, with
investment and vision, be put on a path to becoming the most desirable
employment destination for the best writers and reporters and editors in
America. We have an emerging rabbinate that, frankly, runs the risk of being
captured by ideological forces that do not represent the Jewish community—we
need to dedicate a great deal of effort to ensuring that more liberal Jewish
congregations don’t suffer the same fate as the collapsing Presbyterian Church
(USA). We have millions of engaged Jewish readers who are currently being
disserved by a publishing industry in which “Zionism” has become a dirty word;
let’s rescue publishing, too.
In short, we have a lot; we need a lot more. We need it
because we are not going back to the America we knew as Jews 50 or 40 or even
10 years ago. We need it because we know what has happened to Jewish
communities throughout history, from Cordoba to Cologne to Cairo, that lost
their instinct for danger and failed to notice that their zenith was just a
step away from their precipice. We need it because too many of our children are
walking away from, even turning against, their own Jewish inheritance. We need
it because “Departing” is only a synonym for a new beginning, and Jewish
vitality has, for millennia, been renewed and strengthened by that cycle of
departure and beginning.
And we need it because America needs it—because America
needs us. America needs us as its witty gadfly and loyal critic and skeptical
moral conscience; as the keeper of its tolerant and pluralistic flame; as its
no-sayer in moments of overweening certitude and its yes-sayer in moments of
crushing self-doubt. America needs us because the hope of the New Jerusalem
that our founders sought to create in Plymouth in 1620 and Philadelphia in 1776
and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 could never come to pass if it
were built on anything but the memory and inspiration of that other Jerusalem,
the one that was—and is—ours.
All this was understood once and will be understood
again. Until then, we will endure the honor of being hated, as we continue to
work toward a thriving Jewish future.
