Marty Levine
December 21, 2025
The massacre in Sidney hit me hard. Fifteen innocent people were slaughtered while celebrating Chanukkah, and many others were left wounded. Jews across the world were traumatized and left feeling at risk.
I can only condemn such acts of violence and those who urge them on.
Antisemitism is real. This is not a question.
Worrying about those who were out to get us because we were Jews was with me from my earliest memories. Stories of pogroms in the village my grandfather had fled from in Eastern Europe were part of his legacy to me. What happened to a vibrant Jewish community at the hands of Hitler’s Germany was part of my upbringing. The Yom Kippur martyrology liturgy annually retells stories of the persecution of the Jewish Community through the centuries.
It is easy see the participants in the 2017 Unite The Right march through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews Will Not Replace Us”, as antisemites. There is little question that the killing of men and women during services in synagogues in Pittsburgh and Southern California are inexcusable acts of antisemitic violence.
My feelings on that recent Sunday are not different from those I felt on hearing news of Hamas’ violent breakout from Gaza on October 7, 2023. The horror of each moment is palpable.
In the last two years, I have often written, despite the horror of the moment, of the need to place the events of October 7, 2023, into context. I feel no need to do that about the two men who murdered on that beach in Australia. In my mind, that one event is just one more example of the plague of antisemitism, hatred of Jews because they are Jews. But the other, what happened on October 7th, cannot be understood apart from the ongoing struggle between two peoples over identity, safety, power, and land.
Consider this definition from the United States Holocaust Museum:
Judaism is a monotheistic religion, believing in one god. It is not a racial group. Individuals may also associate or identify with Judaism primarily through ethnic or cultural characteristics. Jewish communities may differ in belief, practice, politics, geography, language, and autonomy.
A Jewish nation-state is unmentioned. But for many, it has become a central precept to their understanding of what it is to be a Jew.
I was born just prior to Israel declaring its independence in May 1948. My family had not, as it fled Eastern Europe, been among those who saw returning to a homeland in Israel as their goal or what made us Jewish. They, like many other refugees, saw the United States as the place where they could build their future.
Building a vibrant Jewish Community in the United States became my calling. My goal was not to encourage American Jews to make Aliyah (emigrate to Israel) their goal. I did not see that act as the culmination of a meaningful Jewish life. My goal was to help American Jews understand the wisdom of our tradition and to discover how it could help them to live a meaningful life. “Bringing Jewish Values to Life” became my mantra.
As much as I understood, as much as I felt a historic connection to the land of Israel, I could not reconcile the reality of the state of Israel with the words of equality that were also part of its founding document.
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
If that dream was ever real, year by year, the scales seemed to be tilting away from living ot that vision. Palestinians became more and more marginalized; their right to their own national identity was denied; their history was erased. As a matter of policy, Israel took any viable future off the table for its Palestinian citizens and those without citizenship living on the lands it occupied. Rather than equality, the State of Israel increasingly showed that what it believed in was Jewish supremacy.
It is in this context that understanding and fighting antisemitism became much more complicated.
For some of us, it was not possible to look away from what was being done in the name of Judaism and say “not in our name”, that nation and its policies are not what Judaism means.
And for others, what Israel did in the name of Judaism and self-protection could not be wrong. Palestinians and those who support them were denying the truth of Judaism and were anti-Semites.
This schism is not new; it has gotten wider and deeper. As the Israeli government and Jewish Israelis have become more militant in their supremacist beliefs and actions, Jews for whom Israel is a central part of identity have become more and more defensive. As the brutality of Israel’s behavior has become more visible, they circled their wagons and became stronger in their denial. Two parts of the Jewish community that could no longer even sit in the same room and have a conversation. “You are either with us, or you are an antisemite” has become their rallying cry.
The meaning of antisemitism has become, in those people’s minds, inextricably tied up in defending Israel and its right to exist as a Jewish (supremacist) state. Protesting the ongoing decimation of Palestinian life, as documented recently by the New York Times, becomes controversial. Speaking words of opposition to Israel and words in support of the Palestinian people became as antisemitic as killing Jews on an Australian beach.
New York Times columnist Brett Stephens took this position when he wrote these words before knew anything about what the assassin’s motives were.
Though we’ll probably learn more in the weeks ahead about the mind-set of Sunday’s killers, it’s reasonable to surmise that what they thought they were doing was “globalizing the intifada.” That is, they were taking to heart slogans like “resistance is justified” and “by any means necessary,” which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over. For many of those who chant those lines, they may seem like abstractions and metaphors, a political attitude in favor of Palestinian freedom rather than a call to kill their presumptive oppressors.
But there are always literalists — and it’s the literalists who usually believe their ideas should have real-world consequences. On Sunday, those consequences were written in Jewish blood. History tells us that it won’t be the last time.
The ADL incorporated this perspective when it launched, in the wake of November’s New York Mayoral election, its “Mamdani Watch.”
As depressing as Stephen’s comments are, there are signs of hope.
In October, Rabbi Eliott Cosgrove of New York City’s Park Avenue synagogue labeled Zohran Mamdani, a candidate in New York City’s recent mayoral election, a threat to Jews. His threat was his unapologetic support for Palestinian liberation and his refusal to condemn such language as “global intifada, a position not different from my own. In the wake of Mamdani’s victory and a recognition that about 30% of New York’s Jewish voters were his supporters, Rabbi Cosgrove recognized the need to reflect differently upon the reality of Jewish life and its relationship to Israel.
Here’s how eJewishPhilanthropy described remarks he made weeks ago to a gathering of Zionists in New York (I am including a long segment of his remarks because I believe they have great relevance for the future of Jewish life, as they begin to recognize how difficult this moment is):
“You may not like the fact that 30% of New York Jews voted for Mamdani, but you shouldn’t be surprised by it,” said Cosgrove. “For a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind. He understood the fissures of our community better than we ourselves did, and the question we face now is, what are we going to do about it?”
In Cosgrove’s speech, he painted a picture of an American Judaism in which questioning Israeli policy has taken on the weight of religious transgression, creating fault lines within the community. “It’s easier to call someone a self-hating Jew than to worry about your own children or grandchildren’s non-observance,” said Cosgrove. “The dividing lines between us no longer fell along the various levels at which we observe Shabbat or our beliefs as to whether the Torah is or isn’t of divine origin… In many respects, engagement with Israel became more than a religion. It became an orthodoxy.”
“I recall the shock and dismay my daughter shared upon returning from her Israel gap year, discovering that her Israeli pre-army mechina peers on whose condition so much of her Jewish identity had been directed, expended zero psychic energy on her well-being and that of Diaspora Jewry. And then we have the nerve to send that kid to a college campus expecting her to defend the policies of a government that does not reflect her values nor recognize her Judaism as Judaism,” said Cosgrove, to both applause and dissatisfied murmurs.
He continued. “If I do this right, I’ll make everyone angry. I may be constitutionally incapable of walking away from Israel, but others have and will continue to do so.”
“The argument that it’s somehow treasonous to criticize this or that Israeli policy simply doesn’t hold as long as that criticism comes from a place of love, loyalty and investment in the well-being of the State of Israel” he said. “And, the heshbon hanefesh [introspection] goes both ways. It happens on both sides. For such a time as this, when Israel is surrounded by enemies, Jewish critics of Israel need to be judicious in how they voice their dissent. It’s one thing to attend a pro-democracy rally in a sea of Israeli flags that begins and ends with the singing of ‘Hatikvah.’ It’s another thing to stand in an encampment next to someone calling for ‘global Intifada.’”
Rabbi Cosgrove has not joined me on the pro-Palestine picket line; he does not agree with me about Israel and its right to exist as a Jewish state, but he has recognized the need for introspection and doubt. He has recognized that without being able to understand those we disagree with we cannot understand ourselves.
For the Jewish community in America, that recognition is critical, or we will rip ourselves apart. Do we have the bravery to recognize that need?
I hope so.
